The world cried out for a dual-core smartphone and LG and NVIDIA answered the call. So here we are, in early February 2011, beholding the world's first smartphone built around a dual-core processor, the Optimus 2X. This is a landmark handset in more ways than one, however, as its presence on the market signals LG's first sincere foray into the Android high end. Although the company delivered two thoroughly competent devices for the platform with the Optimus S and T in 2010, they were the very definition of mid-range smartphones and the truth is that Samsung, HTC and Motorola were left to fight among themselves for the most demanding Android users' hard-earned rubles. So now that LG's joined their ranks, was the wait worth it?
One uninterrupted slate of glass covers the entire front, broken up only by the earpiece grille at the very top. Four capacitive touch buttons keep the 4-inch WVGA LCD company, along with a front-facing camera just to the right of the LG logo. The austere black back (there'll be brown and white versions too) is decorated with a silver column running through the middle brandishing a "with Google" slogan, which ends in a slight bump near the top, designed to accommodate the 8 megapixel camera module. We're happy to see another little glass cover here protecting the lens from accidental damage.
Overall, the Optimus 2X feels very well put together. The screen does suffer from a bout of excessimus bezelitus and we'd have preferred non-capacitive Android buttons, however those are design decisions we'll just have to live with at this point. The star of that internal show is undoubtedly NVIDIA's Tegra 2 system-on-chip. It's highlighted by two 1GHz Cortex-A9 CPU cores and eight GeForce GPU cores, yet still finds the room to include native HDMI and dual display support. Pairing those two together means you can see content on your Optimus 2X and your nearest HDTV at the same time, though that capability isn't available when playing back video (only the bigger screen gets the moving picture feed). We still found plenty of use for the dual display functionality, particularly when browsing or showing off pictures on the handset, but it also helps tilt-controlled games like the preloaded Shrek Kart transform the 2X into a very slick-looking motion controller for big-screen gaming. As we noted above, the mirroring capability is dropped when handling video, but that's unlikely to be an issue because we can't imagine a usage scenario where you'd need to see a video feed on both displays. Scope out the video below for a demonstration of this phone's video-crunching credentials.
Once you get past those well executed headline features, however, there's a certain scarcity of real utility to be had from this dual-core chip. There aren't many, right? The chart below illustrates this well, but it also provides your absolute best case scenario -- you'll need to be engaged in a CPU-intensive process while decoding music in the background, another CPU job, and downloading / installing applications. As soon as you back off, say by switching off the background music and allowing your foreground process to have all the processing power (and thereby complete its task more quickly), the benefits of having a dual-core machine will become far less tangible.
A 4-inch WVGA (800 x 480) LCD might sound like standard fare for modern Android phones, but LG's panel is a notch above the average. It's bright and well saturated, retaining its color fidelity even at oblique viewing angles. In the absence of such advanced display tech or Samsung's snazzy Super AMOLED, we reckon LG has given us the next best thing with the 2X's screen.
Update: As it turns out, LG's 4-inch LCD on the 2X is actually an IPS panel! One thing we touched on in our Optimus 7 review was LG's preference for less sensitive capacitive touchscreens than the competition. It was a commendable choice on the Optimus 7, helping us minimize unintended inputs, however we found the experience on the Optimus 2X rather less satisfying. A great amount of detail, as it turns out. In the full-sized image of the bike rack above, we can read the small print next to the bike's code number without difficulty, while noise is kept in check admirably well. Overall, the Optimus 2X packs a very impressive little camera, particularly when you consider it essentially comes as a free extra on something you're keeping in your pocket anyway, and its full suite of adjustment options adds to those credentials. The first is that colors look a little washed out. Consequently, users bashing the "New" button to start composing a new image are left frustrated and a little confused as to why the phone isn't responding to their input.
The front-facing 1.3 megapixel camera should be thought of strictly as a video calling facilitator. As to video on the Optimus 2X, it can be recorded at resolutions up to 1080p -- we saw no obvious processing lag or frame rate stutters at all -- and does a good job of emulating the camera's stills performance by capturing plenty of visual and aural detail. Battery life was an important aspect for us with this phone, for obvious reasons. We can't conclusively say whether the Optimus 2X is more or less power-efficient than its contemporaries -- efficiency being a function of both power consumption under load and the duration of load times, the latter being shorter on a faster chip -- but we didn't feel any more restricted by its longevity than we did when using the likes of the Galaxy S, Desire HD or Droid X, its direct competitors in the Android big leagues.
Reading the spec sheet, you'd expect lag on the Optimus 2X to be measured in flaps of a hummingbird's wings, but the mildly tweaked Android homescreens plod along in a fashion that's appreciably worse than what you'd get on the real Hummingbird devices, Samsung's Galaxy S variants. It's important to note that applications load up as fast or faster than most other Android handsets we've come across, it's just that navigating to them and through the 2X's menus didn't feel as snappy as we would have liked. Worse yet, the 2X's relatively unresponsive behavior isn't exactly sparing system resources. We installed Advanced Task Killer (which we also managed to crash, woohoo!) on the 2X and even after clearing out all the apps running in the background, the highest amount of memory we could free up was 210MB. That means that of the device's 512MB of available RAM, a good 300MB are taken up by the OS itself. One of the culprits for this lack of frugality is the Music app, which is impossible to shut down because its controls are integrated into Android's window-shade slide-down menu. That integration in itself isn't actually the worst idea in the world -- and neither are the rest of LG's moderate modifications to the Android interface. Contact pages are spruced up in a well organized and logical manner, the messaging application has a delightful little drop-down preview of your latest unread text, and the calendar and weather / clock widgets are also nice extras to have. There's a boilerplate social networking updater, which can send your status out to Twitter, Facebook and Myspace at the same time. The Optimus 2X's saving grace is the same as that of many a Motoblur handset: LauncherPro. Any qualms we have about the Optimus 2X's smoothness evaporate into thin air with LauncherPro in effect, and we even noticed the phone's unlocking animation -- whose appearance remains unchanged -- felt snappier.
LauncherPro patches over, but it doesn't fully heal LG's gaping software wound. We still managed to clunk applications into dysfunction, which was an unfortunate reminder of what lies under the skin. LG's evident weakness on the software front shouldn't be overstated in terms of its impact today -- app glitches were sporadic rather than regular -- but it's a major sticking point if you're hoping the company will deliver a competent Gingerbread for the 2X. The recurring theme through our hardware testing was that Tegra 2's full potential has yet to be tapped. NVIDIA is working hard on correcting that and has enrolled the makers of the Unreal Engine into its development program to ensure that upcoming graphically intensive games make full use of the extra power its new hardware offers. The Tegra Zone, a preloaded app on all Tegra 2 devices, will be central to this effort. It'll present NVIDIA-curated games, videos, trailers, and app recommendations that showcase its chip's superiority. You might call it fragmentation, but NVIDIA would call it just good business.
Update: LG has gotten in touch to say the Tegra Zone app was left on our review handset by accident and won't ship with devices. NVIDIA is still in the process of testing its application out and you'll likely have to download it from the Android Market if you want it on your retail 2X. In the short term, however, this powerful new chip's biggest contributions to the smartphone realm are going to be 1080p video recording and output plus a dash of added gaming oomph.
We started off by talking about LG's failure to make itself known among the Android elite to this point. It carries the hopes and aspirations of an entire multinational corporation, and if you want any evidence of how important mobile hardware is becoming, just go check out LG's latest quarterly and annual fiscal results. This phone matters. The good news for LG is that it's built a very solid foundation for itself with the Optimus 2X -- Tegra 2 is an undeniably powerful, multicore architecture, one that's only going to expand in importance and value as we move forward, and the rest of the phone's specs all match up to our basic expectations of a top tier handset. Construction is robust, finely detailed and generally unobtrusive. Neat little tweaks to Android's default interface failed to obscure the fact that the Optimus 2X is neither as responsive nor as stable as it should be. The Optimus 2X offers great, benchmark-elevating hardware, but can't earn our seal of approval until it gets its software kinks straightened out.
