LG Optimus2X P990 by Amol Nair

Now this is what I call a power packed and punched and stuffed phone... the LG Optimus 2X. This beauty here has enough specs to make the iPhone run for cover. And yes its available for a full 8000 Rs less! So lets go ahead and examine this new offering from LG and find out whether "Life's Good" or not ;)

BUILD: LG has brought some innovation with the Optimus2X and has given it this 'mystery dark warrior' look along with the sword (on the back ;)) . The phone is not the slimmest out there but still is pretty handy with 11mm thickness. It has a big 4 inch screen with capacitive keys for menu, home , back and search. These keys are very responsive. The screen is covered with Gorilla Glass. The rear of the phone holds the 8MP camera with LED flash. The Optimus 2X has a very nice gray soft steel rim while the back is made of soft plastic which feels very good when held. The Optimus2x has dual speakers at the bottom rim along with USB charger port. The top rim holds the power key, 3.5mm audio jack and a HDMI port. (Yes more about this ahead.)

INTERFACE: The Optimus2x has a 4 inch IPS LCD capacitive touchscreen with 16M colors making it one of the best displays in the market. The viewing angles offered are also at par with the best. The phone has a resolution of 480x800 pixels. The phone runs on Android version 2.2 Froyo and can be upgraded to Android 2.3 Gingerbread. Optimus 2x supports multi-touch and flash 10.1. The menu overlay is standard Android 2.2- neat and interesting. The phone supports 7 home screens and hundreds of widgets from the Android market. The QWERTY keyboard on the phone is very comfortable to use with widely spaced keys thanks to the 4 inch screen.

SPECIFICATIONS: Now this is where the movie starts! The LG Optimus 2x has a dual core 1Ghz processor and NVIDIA Geforce Tegra 2 chipset! Now thats what i call a phone. Now if you end up being the proud owner of the phone then here is a fact: LG Optimus2x holds the Guiness record for being the first dual core phone! it has 8GB of inbuilt memory and can support 32GB of external SD card. USB 2.0 and bluetooth 3.0 make sharing faster. browser supports flash 10.1 and due to the dual core processors and NVIDIA chipset the browser loads web pages faster than any phone in the market. Phone has Wi-fi and 3G connectivity (Front camera is present.. hurray). A-GPS for fast and easy navigation is present. The phone has a 1500maH battery which provides the following specs:

Talktime:- 7.8 hours and Standby:- 400 hours.

The benchmark results for phones shows that the LG Optimus 2x is the fastest phone out there easily outrunning the Nexus and the Samsung Galaxy S.

CAMERA: The LG Optimus2x has a 8 mega-pixel camera with LED flash. Hmm thats quite common isn't it? But here is the deal.. the shutter on this baby records Full HD videos i.e 1920x1080p! And Optimus2x is the first phone to do so. The quality of pictures and videos is amazing. There are many customizable options and settings available in the camera. The only problem is that the phone doesn't have a dedicated camera shutter key :| The phone also has a 1.3 MP front camera for 3G video calling.

MULTIMEDIA: Now here is another innovation from LG. The music player on the Optimus2x has an absolutely new and bang-on-target interface. (See pic.) The built in dual stereo speakers gives the music a high on this phone so do the the headphones which is helped with at least 20 equalizer settings! Thats a first too! The phone supports MPEG and H264 formats and plays High Definition 1080p videos with ridiculous ease. The phone comes with a HDMI port. Yes, now you can connect your Optimus2x to your HD TV and watch movies, play games, scan your pictures, transfer files and do much more.

Thumbs Up: IPS 4 inch screen, 8MP camera with Full HD recording, dual core processor with NVIDIA Tegra2, front camera,Lower price.. etc etc etc

Thumbs down: No camera shutter key.

The LG Optimus 2x is priced at Rs. 28000/- but is easily available for Rs 25000-Rs 26000/-

- Amol Nair (anamysterio@gmail.com)