LG has been playing reasonably good in the Indian market and now, the company has launched LG Optimus Sol E730 series phone in India. This $380 gadget is good enough if you are looking for an Android phone with a pretty good camera and sturdy build.
This is the first review of The 4Cast and we think we have got a reasonably good phone to start with. There has been a lot of competition in the 3G enabled mobile devices lately in the market and LG has been doing a pretty decent job in this space with the Optimus series. Can the LG’s new Optimus E730 Android phone jump into a more competitive ring and hold its own empire? Read the full review to know more.
Hardware & Design
This phone loves your Fingerprints!
The Optimus E730 is amazing. The phone comes with a 3.8-inch, but this is the same size as that of the Optimus Black. The bottom most part of the display is consumed by three capacitive touch soft buttons which gives access to the Menu, Home and the Back. The buttons, unlike the LG Spectrum looks better and more accessible on regular use. In LG Spectrum, these buttons looks more like a physical button making it look like a cheap knockoff.
LG has definitely put a lot of effort in making this phone look gorgeous and mainly without any silver bezel. The phone is completely furnished with a sturdy plastic. The plastic is addicted to fingerprints and you sometimes need to be rubbing the phone on your shirt to make it shine and free it from fingerprints. But if you could take a closer look at the phone, you will find it glitter in the light, since LG has added the glitter crystals here and there across the phone’s plastic casing.
The phone sports only one Micro-USB port at the top making it the only way to establish a wired connection to the phone for both charging and transferring data. Next to the Micro-USB port is the Power/Sleep button, just like how the iPhone has. And even the headphone jack is placed next to the Micro-USB port. It looks a little bit crowded at the top, but then, the sides of the phone and the bottom are kept neat and empty.
To the left of the phone, there’s a volume rocker, which can occasionally be used to zoom in and out of the camera. Overall, the phone is solid and feels good in hand and it does not feel heavy.
Bottomline: The phone feels almost weightless with tightly packed top bezel!
Display
The AMOLED Display is Amazing!
The Optimus sport a 9.7 cm Ultra AMOLED display that is definitely rocking. The phone’s display is sharp, clear and accurate with colors. And surprisingly, the phone performed almost equal to Samsung Galaxy S II’s display. The phone performs super fine with warm color temperatures and there are no high or low tints of red, green or yellow throughout the phone. The Viewing angles are pretty good, but the screen can also be used as a mirror since it is super shiny and has got a very high tendency to reflect light. The other thing I noted while reviewing the phone is that the display has gone a little inside when compared to other phones of the same category. The LCD might have come a bit closer to the protective Gorilla glass instead of staying inside.
The display was in par with Droid RAZR and I was hardly able to figure out the individual pixels on the display especially in an all-white background. But the black shades on the screen renders more like grey and is not so easily noticeable. And LG has got a cool interface that concentrates more on the icons’ sizes rather than the text in it, which can be of help for people like me, but it would be difficult for new smartphone users to understand the icons’ meaning.
Bottomline: The display is good and is definitely worth the money!
Cameras
It ‘can be’ your backup camera!
The 5-megapixel camera on the back of the Optimus E730 can take pretty decent pictures and if you are not a huge camera buff, this camera will definitely suffice your need. The camera performs really good when pictures are taken in bright light, but performs nominally under low-light conditions.
The Autofocus feature is so quick, simple and almost accurate and lock on things that I really want to lock. You point at an object or a face, tap on the camera icon on the device, and that’s it, the phone takes care of the Autofocus and clicks the picture for you! Since the delay to perform autofocus is almost instant, you don’t have to worry about it anymore with this device. On the other side, I found it hard to use the softkey to capture a picture. But it would have been great if the device had a hard key for it. The front camera is pretty good, but not so great under low-light conditions.
The colors were accurate and the picture pixelates only after intense zooming. But for nominal viewing, this would be good enough. The phone almost has a zero-shutter lag, and the camera performs well with this phone and with a great autofocus feature.
The Video did perform well, but it would pixelate much often. The autofocus works seamlessly while recording a video but sometimes it forgets about it and starts recording blurry videos. The phone shoots 1280×720 resolution videos and the things get a little worse when shooting under variable light conditions. I don’t think LG has put in some stabilization mechanism into it, and the videos does not get stabilized for some reason. Overall, the phone performs well with Pictures, but fails to play good with the videos. But as I mentioned earlier, if you are not a huge camera bug, then this would be the phone for you!
Bottomline: Good for Pictures but Not so great with Videos!
Software & UI
Good for beginners but Root it if you are an expert!
The phone glued my eyes onto it when it booted up for the first time, with a simple and elegant LG logo with rays of light passing behind it. It gave me a hint that they UI could be great even before I hit the Home Screen for the first time. But on the lock screen, the phone’s new method to Swipe-up to Unlock seemed to be a good option. Atleast to avoid patent infringements. I did not get it right the first time, and the protective UI had a kinetic bounce when it fell back after a failed unlock.
The phone comes with Android 2.3 Gingerbread and is definitely not that jawdropping when compared to HTC Legend and such custom UI phones. LG has included some software like the Car Home, Smart Share, Smart World, What’s New and Wi-Fi Cast. These apps are pretty useful, and I found What’s New really useful since it unifies almost all your notifications like SMS, EMails and other in one single place. To be true, LG has made only minor tweaks to the regular Gingerbread UI (Which usually sucks) and has made us feel more like just another smartphone OS with the power of Android. The icons are Sharp and the UI is pretty fast. But still, you need to search for the Task Manager to kill background apps, which is annoying. There’s not much bloatware loaded up in the phone, and even the pre-loaded apps are really useful for every user out there.
Bottomline: Simple, neat and Non-Androidish!
Performance, Battery Life & Call Quality
The 1Ghz processor does the trick!
Thanks to the 1Ghz processor that powers the phone and the performance was rock solid. But you load up more apps, that run background services, and Android shows itself up, slowing down the device. There were lags when I hit the home button from an app, but still, it is bearable.
The UI is fast but performance takes a hit when you run more than three apps in the background, which is where you realize that there’s a 1GHz processor running and it needs to perform better.
The Browser performance was pretty impressive and performed really well with 3G networks. We tried loading up our Mobile Browser test page which is internal, and is furnished fully with CSS3, HTML5 Canvas and pretty tearing on page graphics and heave images and the phone performed pretty well, except that it consumed a lot of memory. But when using normal websites, the browsing was pretty fast and the UI is definitely approachable. The scrolling had minor jitters, but that is bearable. The phone performed just below the Galaxy Nexus S with Quadrant.
Call Quality
In general, the Optimus’ call quality is pretty good and calls were very clear on both the ends of the conversation. The earpiece that comes along with the phone performed less than what the native in-device speaker provided. The Noise cancellation was very decent at the receiver’s end and overall, the phone performs very well in this section.
Battery Life
Well, this is the most important section of any phone that you would get. By this time, we all would be expecting the battery life to reduce as the performance increases. But luckily, LG has managed to give a better battery life with this device. The phone is powered by a 1500MAH battery. The device performed under the expectation when used heavily. I tried playing around with Netflix and Browsing over 3G and the battery drained fair enough under these conditions. This device definitely does not have a bad battery life and is usable for normal users.
Bottomline: Battery and Call Quality steals the show!
Final Thoughts
The phone that many beginners wanted!
The LG Optimus E730 would definitely taste success among the Android crowd, if marketed properly. With a neat and tidy UI and a great Call Quality and battery life, the phone is a winner. The lags that are still there on the phone can be rectified via a software update.
If you are looking for a phone, with a decent camera, pretty good performance and a great call quality with battery life, then the LG Optimus E730 is for you!