Tuesday 2nd November 2010

LG Optimus Windows Phone 7

The LG Optimus powered by Windows Phone 7 OS is now available on the Vodafone network, so you can get your mits on the latest smart kit to take on the iPhone.

There are three different brands offering WP7 OS in Ireland now, and even though the LG is physically the smallest (compared to the Samsung and the HTC WP7 models), it still is a hefty handset.

There are design rules for harware running WP7 so there may be some similarities to other models, but if you are a fan of LG phones, you will get to grips with it pretty quickly.

Physically there is a camera button on the right edge (always a good spot), and three buttons on the front below the screen: "back", "search" and a "homescreen" button. These buttons are repeated on all of the hardware with Windows Phone 7.

This is a phone that is not just pretending to be a smart phone - it has WiFi, 3G and GPS, a 5 MP camera and 165GB internal memory, all running very quickly.

One nice feature that the LG has that other Windows phones don't have is a Panoramic Camera mode, which allows you to snap a 360 degree shot.

The OS has a series of "tiles" stacked 2 abreast on top of each other, linking you to messages, mail, web, keypad, media and an XBox Live app.

You can have quite a few of these tiles on top of each other and slide up and down to reach them. It works okay, but the vertical thumb movement can be less natural than a lateral thumb movement that we are used to on many other of the latest phones. Once you don't stack up a huge amount of icons, then the large tiles are easy and quick enough to use.

There is a much improved web experience, with pinch-to-zoom, and hyperlink recognition, and the ability to play YouTube.

You have to be into Windows - as you have to use Zune as your media player, but you can stream your content to a Windows 7 PC, and it has a nice augmented reality setup called "Scan Search", which points you in the direction of all nearby points of interest and even will give you the weather forecast by just pointing the phone at the sky!

The build quality is good, it has a metal backplate combined with rubberised grips, the screen is super-reactive with highly responsive capacative glass, and the micro-USB slot, that is also used to charge the battery, is stored under a protective cover flap in the right side of the casing.

It will be interesting to see how many of the Windows Phone 7 variants sell, facing the monolith that is the iPhone, and the clever Android army, but no one is laughing at this smart phone.