Full review of the first smart on NVIDIA Tegra 2 - LG Optimus 2x

Frankly, Optimus 2x is the first LG smartphone that I liked all at once. Not that the others would not like at all, but usually you sit, weigh the pros and cons, and here there is almost one solid positive - excellent appearance and crazy filling!

Design

Optimus has ceased to be a budget tube. Despite the fact that it is completely plastic (a metal strip with the inscription Google on the back panel does not count), the gadget gives the impression of an expensive and very high-quality thing. Build on five with a plus - nothing creaks, even if you try to twist it. The gaps between the parts of the housing are minimal. Everything is literally knocked down in one whole brick!



The connectors and buttons, in my opinion, are located exactly where you need it - nothing interferes with the manipulations, and you don’t need to go far either. At the top there is a power and lock button, a 3.5 mm headphone jack and an HDMI output under the flap, which allows you to easily display a 1080p picture on the big screen. On the right there was a place for two volume keys. And at the bottom there are two speakers and a microUSB port for connecting to a computer.



A two-megapixel camera for video calls stands out on the right above the display against a general dark background, and on the left, if you look closely, you can distinguish a set of sensors for controlling the backlight. Under the screen are four touch “android” keys. I can’t say that they greatly please me, but in this case their mechanical counterparts would be out of place here - the whole concept would immediately fall apart.

Display

The 2x widescreen display is one of the largest on the market - four inches. This, unfortunately, is not AMOLED, but the usual TFT, but with a decent resolution of 800 x 480 pixels, and, surprisingly, it is not inferior in quality to displays on organic LEDs. Viewing angles, brightness, contrast - all at a high level. The only negative is that it will still have higher energy consumption.

Iron

But in fact, the coolest things in this smartphone can not be shown either in photographs or in video! Optimus 2x is the first smartphone built on the NVIDIA Tegra 2 platform - an entire system on a single chip. Several cores work for the owner at once: the two main ARM Cortex-A9 MPCore cores with a frequency of 1 gigahertz and quite an adult cache (32 Kb and 1 Mb for L1 and L2, respectively). Plus, several special hardware solutions for three-dimensional graphics (eight-core ULP GeForce chip), as well as encoding and decoding of video and sound.



All this gives a tangible performance boost both in subjective sensations and in synthetic tests like Quadrant Standart. The latter rated the power of 2x as much as a thousand points higher than HTC Desire HD. Communicators, capable, like this Optimus, to gain 2467 points, I have not yet met.

With this smart, most likely, you won’t have to bother with transferring applications and games to the SD card from the main memory, since it is enough here. By default, all software is placed on a 2-GB partition of an eight-gigabyte flash array.



But RAM is not enough. For such a beast like Optimus 2x 512 MB - this is not serious at all. However, there is really nothing to complain about here: not even one of the most difficult games in terms of graphics (including those designed to run on SE Xperia Play) did not slow down on the second Tegra.

Communication

Otherwise, nothing unusual was noticed in the hardware. Naturally, the full stuffing of wireless connections: 3G, Wi-Fi b / g / n with support for DLNA and Wi-Fi Direct, Bluetooth, GPS and FM-radio. True, I have one gripe: when the connection was lost and the cellular network was later discovered, the gadget did not want to connect to the Internet, and sometimes just make calls, so I had to switch to the “Airplane” mode and vice versa. But it’s clear that this is still a pre-production model, and the LG-level company producing a device of this level cannot afford to make mistakes. Definitely, by the time sales are launched, this problem will be resolved.

Camera

In general, the new Envidian platform supports cameras up to 12 megapixels, but LG apparently decided that it would be too much and built an 8-megapixel sensor into the rear panel of its gadget, which in difficult lighting conditions comes with an LED flash.



In general, the photos pleased. On the Optimus 2x display, they look very good, but if you open them on the big screen, you will notice characteristic noises.


Full size


photo Full size photo

This camera can not only take pictures, but also shoot video in 1080p format at 24 frames per second. But if you need 30 fps, you have to lower the resolution to 720p.

Gj

Now Optimus 2x is running Android 2.2, but soon the developers promise to transfer it to the next version - 2.3. In fact, this is, of course, good, but still not enough, since neither version of the software is designed for multi-threaded computing. In my opinion, waiting for Honeycomb to appear on it is pointless, and something tells me that by the time the tablet and smartphone versions of Android merge again, an update for this gadget will not work either. This is a little sad.

But under Tegra 2 the Android Market is “optimized”. There, a special section will soon open with advanced games that will be tough for this chip only.

I also want to note the useless, but nice feature called “Gestures”, which LG even brought to a separate sub-menu of the “Settings” menu. Owners (and not only them) of HTC communicators are familiar with the function of increasing the volume of a call if the device "thinks" that it is in your pocket, or the function of turning off the call if the gadget is put with the display down. But the developers of Optimus 2x went further and, among other things, taught the accelerometer to respond to tapping the body. While in the gallery or player, you can scroll through photos and tracks by double-tapping the corresponding ends of the smartphone. I repeat, it is interesting, but I used this function only once when I checked how it works :)


You definitely need to talk about such an important thing in your device as an on-screen keyboard. At first I thought that it was not very convenient in 2x, but with time I got used to it and got involved, and now I miss the panel with frequently used symbols.

Working hours

NVIDIA claims that Tegra 2, with all its power, has reduced power consumption due to the distribution of calculations across the cores and the presence of a special ARM7 core that controls all the others and turns them on and off in time. I am ready to believe it, but only after the software platform begins to match the hardware. Now, non-optimized Android and a large bright display in 6-7 hours discharge the phone to zero. Well, or if you don’t touch the gadget at all, a 1500 mAh battery can last for 12 hours.

Summary

LG Optimus 2x is a very cool gadget. One of the most interesting communicators that I have met lately both in terms of design and hardware. Although the potential of Tegra 2 has not yet been used to its fullest, anyway, the presence of this “stone" allows you to forget about the brakes. And as for power consumption, the owners of Android devices, and so in fact almost always carry a charger with them. The only thing that stops me from buying it immediately is the spiteful price tag, on which there will obviously be a five-digit number starting with the three ...