LG Optimus One P503 Mobile Phone Review

LG does a bit of customization to the Android interface as well. Starting off, you can select between five or seven home screens and the fixed bar at the bottom offers five shortcuts instead of three found on stock Android. You also get a nice weather and calender widgets however, the coolest thing for me is the wall paper of Sheikh Zayed Road. It shows you that LG has actually put some work towards customizing their phone for the region. The Dialer is also slightly modified- you can search for contacts using your keypad instead of the keyboard which helps find someone quickly.

On the usability sides of things, the Optimus proves to be reasonably zippy with its interface, even though it is powered by a 600MHz CPU. I’m sure some of that has to do with the fact that it is running on Android 2.2 though there are times when you can see the phone struggling. The smaller screen has a lower 480×320 resolution but that really did not turn out to be an issue.

What can be a minor annoyance is the smaller 3.2” screen size of the LG Optimus One. While the smaller screen helps making the unit more portable, it also makes the onscreen keyboard cramped which slowed down my typing speed. Thus, you need to rotate the device in landscape mode whenever you want to use the keyboard at a comfortable pace.

I was quite impressed by the battery life on the LG Optimus One. It’s one of the fewer Android handsets that can last almost two days on a single charge and this is due to the high capacity 1500mAh 5.6Wh battery that LG equips the handset with. The 3MP camera on the other hand, is pretty average and the absence of flash only makes it usable under decently lighted conditions. While the camera itself is not that great, the bundled application with the camera is pretty slick.

Overall, the LG Optimus One is an excellent offering from LG for someone looking to venture into Android territory. It’s equipped with Froyo 2.2 and has a pretty impressive battery life along with a reasonably zippy interface and lots of localization including Arabic support. Priced at AED 1399 (US$380), I’ll say that the LG Optimus One is the best mid-priced Android Mobile Phone available today.