The LG Optimus 3D is a beast. That's normally meant as a compliment, but in reality, being a beast is a bit of a double-edged sword. Sure, you're big and powerful -- enough to rip your shirt open at the slightest provocation, at the very least. But you're also more than a little ugly and difficult to get on with. Don't believe the fairytales about the beast going off with the princess after she's discovered he has a heart of gold. Girls are far more fickle than that.
Ahem. We were talking about the LG Optimus 3D, weren't we? Let's start with that all-consuming power. The Optimus 3D has a dual-core 1GHz processor, which is more than capable of most tasks that you throw at it, including 3D 720p video capture. It has 8GB of internal storage, a SD card slot for expanding that further, and all the usual HSDPA, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity options.
The display is pretty impressive too -- a larger-than-average 4.3-inch capacitive touchscreen, running at 480 x 800 resolution. It copes well in sunlight, and you'll be surprised how much of a usability improvement the larger screen delivers when it comes to hitting the right key on an on-screen keyboard or playing games.
Unfortunately, rather than use that display to show off stock Android's rather tasty design, LG's chosen to slather everything in its own user interface, which is ugly as sin. It's square, it's squat, it's outdated, it's not pleasant to use, and worst of all it replaces several bits of perfectly good software included by default in Android.
One example is the News app. Google's News and Weather app detects your location automatically, picks a selection of local media sources, and links to a wide range of stories in different categories. You click them, and they open in the browser where the news source gets advertising revenue.
LG's app, on the other hand, demanded that I manually set a location and some categories before I got to see any news, and once I had, gave me nothing but an RSS feed from Sky News in the "Top Stories" category. Clicking through to a story gave me a paragraph, which I then had to click through again to get to the actual story.
Then there's the 3D. Let's not beat around the bush here -- it's a useless gimmick. Sure, it's fun for 30 seconds, and it'll earn you brief credibility if you wave it at your friends in the pub. But even aside of the argument as to whether it's nicer to look at than 2D, it doesn't add any actual functionality -- just novelty.
The only place where you can make an argument that 3D is actually worth using is in the games on the phone. Here, powerups whizz out of the screen, golf balls disappear satisfyingly into the distance and cars slide convincingly around corners. It's a pity the games themselves aren't much cop, but crucially the 3D does genuinely improve the experience. Enough to want to be tied into a lengthy contract for? Perhaps not.
It'd be wrong not to mention, too, that the Optimus 3D has launched with an outdated version of Android -- version 2.2. Version 2.3 has been available for the best part of six months, so it's ridiculous to see phones arriving still packing the previous edition. There's no real excuse for this, except that LG's bloatware probably doesn't work with the latest version of Android yet.
Finally, we got surprisingly poor battery life from the 1,500 mAh Li-Ion battery. You might be expecting that the big screen and meaty processor were sucking up the juice, but a glance at Android's battery use graph suggested that it was actually cell standby causing the power drain. That's a little surprising, and could suggest there's some sort of software glitch, which is hopefully fixable with a patch.
Conclusion
So, what have we learnt? We've learnt that the LG Optimus 3D is powerful, and large. But we've also learnt that it's ugly, bloated, a little outdated, and makes your eyes hurt if you look at it for too long.
The LG Optimus 3D is a beast, but it's also pretty beastly.
