The market is already flooded with and populated by Samsung's Galaxy and HTC's Desire series of smartphones. Do we really need another addition to LG's Optimus smartphones too? When you consider that the Korean bigwig's latest spawn is the world's first dual-core smartphone, the answer is Yes. Powered by an NVIDIA Tegra 2 chip, how different is it really from your run-of-the-mill smartphone?

Understanding dual core

Before we get into the details of the phone, let's look at what you can expect from a dual-core smartphone. What the NVIDIA Tegra 2 chip contains is two 1GHz Cortex A9 GPU cores, and 8 GeForce GPU cores. The two Cortex cores ensure faster web browsing, better response time and better performance. The GeForce cores mainly deal with 3D gaming, so you can expect an enhanced gaming experience on this phone. The cherry on the cake of course is 1080p playback – this means you can hook up the phone to your HDTV and stream hi-def content straight off it, without compromising on your battery life.

First impressions

The Optimus 2X is no budget phone and this is evident from the body and build. The glass layer that covers the 4-inch IPS screen spans over the entire front side of the phone, with the exception of an angular ear speaker on top. Towards either side, the glass gently slopes down in an angle, accentuating the curves on the four corners. Below the screen are four capacitive touch Android buttons – the regular ones for Menu, Home, Return and Search.

Connectivity wise, you get a mini USB port at the bottom and a mini HDMI port on the top. Other features include a 3.5mm headphone jack, volume rocker switch and power button. Stereo speakers are located at the bottom. You get a 1-meg front camera for video calls, and the back is endowed with a hefty 8-meg snapper. The chocolate brown rubberised panel ensures a firm grip and is fairly scratch resistant, and the metallic strip running down the centre holds the camera with the LED flash.

User Interface

The Optimus 2X is an Android 2.2 phone, upgradeable to v2.3. Apart from a few modifications, there's no distinctive LG skin over the Android interface. To unlock the phone you have to slide your finger up the screen, which brings up the Android home screen. There's the standard dock at the bottom, with icons for Phone, Contacts, Messaging and Applications. You can have up to 7 home screens on the phone, to which you can add practically any widget or shortcut. There's a nice default weather app with animations from AccuWeather.com which we found quite useful. Apart from the regular Android apps, you can also choose from LG widgets to add. There's a Social Feed widget which will display updates from your Gmail, Facebook, Twitter and MySpace accounts. It even gave us the option to add our Whatsapp account to the list, after we downloaded it from the Android Market.

The capacitive touch screen on the Optimus 2X was extremely responsive, registering even the lightest of touches. It was really easy for us to type out messages on the QWERTY keypad even in portrait mode. You'll have to make do with the default LG keyboard though, because the phone doesn't give you an option to use the standard Android keyboard. Word prediction doesn't work too well with LG's keyboard, and it's a pain to switch to the number mode when you want to do something as simple as put in a comma or apostrophe in your text.

Media

Entertainment wise, the Optimus 2X is a virtual powerhouse of sorts. You can access your videos from the Android Gallery app, or view a handy list from the Video Player app. We played a couple of HD videos on the phone, and they played back beautifully, with details sharp and clear, and no dropping between frames. You can even change the resolution from 4:3 to 16:9, depending on what you prefer. If you pause a video midway and start working on something else, the phone will give you an option to resume watching from the point you left off, or start over from the beginning. All that's missing is a little kickstand! We hooked up the phone to our HDTV via the provided HDMI cable, and it streamed full HD videos on our TV beautifully, without draining the battery life on the phone.

LG's email app allows you to set up virtually any account, and even gives you the option of a combined inbox. But if you're a Gmail user, you can just stick to the default Android app, which will give you push notifications of any new emails. The Browser was neat and snappy, letting us zoom in and out of web pages using by pinching or tapping the screen. You can have multiple tabs and switch easily between them. LG has default apps for Twitter and Facebook, but we prefer the Android versions.

The 8-megger camera gave us some decent results. It has a few scene, shot and colour modes to choose from. We won't go over the details again because we covered them in our Top 5 camera phones story last week. The only grudge we had was the absence of a physical shutter release button.

There's a Tegra Zone app on the Market which you can download, to help you find Tegra 2-optimised games. We downloaded Dungeon Defenders First Wave Deluxe HD. There was a lot of detail in the graphics, and the gyro sensor made it considerably easier to navigate through the game.

A big plus is the onboard storage – 8GB of internal memory, expandable by 32GB via micro SD card. That's more than enough for all your media needs.

Performance

Contrary to the belief that a dual core processor drains battery life, the Optimus 2X actually crossed the 24-hour mark. This was with 3 hours of talktime and some video playback, browsing and texting as well. Of course, the battery is heftier at 1500 mAh.

Call quality was decent, however a little more volume on our end would have been welcome. The callers on the other side had no complaints though.

The phone never crashed on us. We only once had trouble with Wi-Fi, but this was easily fixed by restarting the phone.

When we were multi-tasking, applications ran smoothly in the background, and we never noticed any lag when browsing or using any of the apps we downloaded on to the phone.

Our Verdict

If you're not one to use your smartphone to the max, you may not notice the difference that a dual-core processor makes. However, you can expect less chances of the phone freezing and crashing on you, because of the new processor working in the background. And considering LG's priced the Optimus 2X on par with the other high-end smarties in the market, it seems like a pretty competitive contender.

Love: HD playback, good battery life

Hate: Minimal changes to Android interface, no physical camera button

Rs 30,000

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