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In a highly competitive smartphone market, many manufacturers have forgotten to shine the spotlight on the product with the most potential – the mid-range smartphone. While the inflated prices of high-end phones do come down after a few months, if you're looking for a smartphone with the latest software, a mid-ranger might do the trick. Of course, you will have to compromise a bit on performance and build, but for a good price, that's a bargain that a lot of users are willing to make. LG, which has been relatively quiet after the launch of the Optimus 3D has introduced a couple of mid-range handsets. The latest from LG, the Optimus Sol, landed on my review bench.
Looks
For a smartphone in its price range, the Optimus Sol sports quite a classy design and build. Of course, it's not eye-catching like the Nokia Lumia 710 or Motorola Defy+, but it definitely doesn't feel cheap. The 3.7-inch screen is generous the use of a Super AMOLED display with Corning Gorilla Glass protection is a huge bonus. The phone is also incredibly light at just 110g. It actually reminded me a lot of the Samsung Galaxy S in terms of looks.
The Optimus Sol has a rear facing 5-megapixel camera and a front facing VGA camera. The three LED backlit touch buttons on the bottom of the bezel for Menu, Home and Back have these functions thoughtfully labelled on top, although they don't light up and are difficult to spot in low lighting.
User Interface
The Optimus Sol runs Android v2.3.4 (Gingerbread) and features the Optimus 2.0 overlay (think HTC Sense). As far as overlays go, I've had some bad experiences but Optimus 2.0 is quite unobtrusive and didn't interfere much with the Android experience. There is a big selection of widgets on offer which look quite attractive on screen. A handy addition is the inclusion of a Downloads category in the Applications folder which neatly distinguishes the two.
The Super AMOLED screen is extremely bright and detailed and on the 480x800 pixel screen, the Optimus UI looks very colourful and attractive. Responsiveness was good but there were minor lags when unlocking the phone and swiping screens, which is more of a problem with the processor. Even though the Optimus Sol is an Android phone, LG only offers its own LG keyboard which wasn't as accurate as Android's keyboard and also lacked commonplace features such as Swype.
The phone comes bundled with a selection of pre-installed apps which include Polaris Office, SmartShare for DLNA-enabled devices and SmartWorld, LG's own app store. SmartWorld has a small but interesting selection of apps and from what I could see, all of them are free.
Media
The 5-meg camera at the rear has a nice selection of scene modes and the usual crop of colour effects. It supports tap to focus but not tap to shoot. And unfortunately, like most other Android phones, it lacks a physical shutter button. The camera can also record video in 720p HD.
The included Video Player can support MP4, DivX and Xvid files and the music player supports MP3 files. An FM Radio is included too. The stock browser loaded pages quite fast on a Wi-Fi connection – our website www.blsmartbuy.com loaded in 5 seconds. There are convenient forward and back buttons, tabs and settings neatly arranged at the bottom and the bookmarks button on top. Pinch to zoom is only supported in non-mobile versions of web sites.
Performance
The phone runs a 1GHz Qualcomm MSM8255 processor with Adreno 205 graphics – identical to what the Nokia Lumia 800 and Lumia 710 are equipped with. However, while these specifications work fine for a Windows phone, with Android it just doesn't make the cut. With dual-core becoming the norm and quad-cores being introduced, it looks like Android is going to be the most power hungry operating system yet.
Like I mentioned earlier, there were frequent delays for simple tasks, which became even more amplified if I was multitasking. The phone did freeze on me a couple of times but usually managed to revive itself in a few seconds – nothing I would worry about.
I ran some standard Android benchmarking tests on the Optimus Sol. For Linpack, the Optimus Sol scored 38 MFLOPS, as compared to the 42 MFLOPS on the HTC Rhyme. Quadrant scores were 1303, a tad lower than the Sony Ericsson Xperia Ray's 1639. (Higher is better) Both the comparison handsets feature similar CPU's to the Optimus Sol.
Call quality on the handset was very good and I was able to hear callers clearly for the most part.
There were no dropped calls either, although some callers did complain that they were unable to get through to my number – something I don't have to deal with on my regular handset.
The Optimus Sol has a 1,500 mAh Li-ion battery which is pretty standard and I got the average one day of use. I had TweetCaster and Gmail on push notifications and with about 2 hours of talktime, texting and WhatsApp usage, I often managed to exceed the 24 hour benchmark.
Our verdict
The Optimus Sol is one of the better midrange smartphones available. A decent build quality, good screen and updated software could bring LG the kind of success the Optimus One brought the company over a year ago. The slight lags and delays don't make it the smoothest handset in the market but it's a fair compromise to make for the price you pay.
Love: Excellent screen, good call quality
Hate: Occasional slowdowns, average keyboard
Rs 19,000
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