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LG is on its way to give a tough competition to its competitors in the smartphone market. The launch of the new Optimus Black p970 is a classy example of how the company is stressing hard to prove it. The phone comes with a NOVA display and sports a 400x800 pixel resolution with 16 mn colors, which makes the screen viewable even in sunlight. When it comes to looks, this phone doesn't disappoint at all. It has a rounded edge body and a 4.0” full capacitive touch screen made of gorilla glass. It matches up as no sign of scratch occurs even after the screen is scraped with key and nails. Weighing about 110 g, it is one of the slimmest and lightest android phones in the market. In the price range of `20,000, it is a good option for those seeking for a complete smartphone package.
Hardware
On the hardware front, the phone has a 1GHz Cortex A-8 processor, Power VR SGX 530 GPU, and a TI OMAP 36O chipset which generates power from Android, v2.2 (Froyo) which is upgradable to v2.3. The phone comes with 512 MB RAM which is a bit low compared to other smartphones in the market available in 712 MB RAM in the same segment but the difference is hard to find as it plays all the applications smoothly and doesn't trouble at all while running heavy applications.The accelerometer sensor for user interface auto-rotate provides a lot of ease while watching videos and typing. The phone comes with 2 GB internal memory which expands upto 32 GB giving enough space for music, videos, and other important applications which can be downloaded from the android market.
The phone supports HSDPA and HSUPA network providing a speed of 7.2 Mbps and 5.6 Mbps, respectively, while on 3G. The speed is enough to stream videos in high quality and downloading bulky files in a short span of time. The device has DLNA technology and Wi-Fi on the connectivity front and can work as a Wi-Fi hotspot.
The phone comes with a 2 mega pixel front facing camera for video calls. This makes the phone in its segment a class apart as no other handset manufacturer is providing the same quality front facing camera.
However the battery back-up of the phone is not upto the mark and the battery exhausts quite fast while running the applications. The total standby time of the phone stood at about 80 hours, while the phone's battery lasted for about 3 hours while playing video and 7 hours on audio playback.
The phone plays almost every video file thrown at it from the usual 3GP and MP4 format to AVI and WMV files using DivX and Xvid. The phone was unable to play 1080p videos but 720p videos worked just fine. The subtitles worked pretty well. With settings for font and size they can be toggled on and off.
The video player is just a list of all the videos on the phone with an alphabet scroll to help locate videos faster. The player has a simple interface with nothing complicated in it. The audio quality is average but not impressive. The music player too has an alphabet search and regular search for finding songs quicker.
Software
The browser with flash 10.3 support delivers a good performance both functionally and visually while web surfing gives an impression as if the users are surfing on their laptops. Apart from this, the phone even has Gmail application which redirects the user straight to the Gmail page.
The phone has a GPS module and Google Maps and even a weather and news reader application to let the user get general updates on a single touch. There are plenty of apps in the LG world to help in upgrading the devices' functionality.
Rimit Singh
rimits@cybermedia.co.in