An Android journey with the LG Optimus One

          I recently made a jump to the Android bandwagon. Most of you have probably heard of it. It is Google's mobile operating system that is built on open source Linux. In the last year, several top phone manufacturers have started making Android handsets in various configurations and Google reported this week that they are seeing over 3,00,000 Android activations daily! Android has beaten the Blackberry OS in market share and is giving the iPhone OS a serious run for its money.

The advantages of an Android smartphone are:

• Slick user interface and awesome integration with Google services. You key in your gmail ID and password and everything just works!
• Like the iPhone App Store, the Android Market has thousands of applications, free and paid (a lot of great free applications too! I haven't paid for a single app yet!) that you have access to.
• Unlike the iPhone or Blackberry where you have limited choice of hardware to choose from, Android comes on a range of devices from the entry level to the super premium.
• You don't have to pay the Apple tax! An iPhone 3Gs can cost upwards of Rs.30,000 in India. You can get Android devices with similar hardware for half the price! Or for the same price you can get a top end Android phone which blows away the iPhone! While Blackberry does have its place among business users, for normal users like you and me, Android again wins with price per feature.
• Android is highly customizable. You can tweak practically everything about the phone and the way it functions to suit your liking and usage.

My earlier phone (which I still have and use as an MP3 player!) was a Nokia 5800 XpressMusic. A real sturdy handset with great hardware but an aging OS (Symbian^1) and resistive touchscreen. While shopping around for a new phone, I was really impressed with the hardware on the Nokia N8, which I still maintain to be the best phone hardware in the market today. But the Symbian^3 OS didn't quite cut the ice. Nokia needs to get their head out of the sand and start putting Android on their devices.

Anyway, I did not want to spend upwards of Rs. 15,000 on a phone since the technology changes so fast and we get bored of our handsets and change it every year or so. I had been keeping an eye on the 'budget' section of android smartphones for sometime now. I had some basic criteria in mind for what I wanted in an Android phone:

• All the bells and whistles of connectivity – 3G, WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS, USB
• Capacitive touch screen – far more responsive compared to the resistive ones (like the one on Nokia 5800). Read more about it here: http://bit.ly/hLgVbB
• Run the latest available version of Android (see below). Many manufacturers sell phones with older versions of Android and may not bother to roll out upgrades. Typically phones with 1.6 cant upgrade beyond 2.1. And only 2.2 onwards support installing apps on memory card.
• At least HVGA screen resolution (see below)
• 3.5mm jack for audio output.

There are currently 5 active versions of Android (of which 2.2 is the most current version available on commercial phones at this time)

Version	Codename	Availability
1.6	Donut	Currently being phased out, most manufacturers have 2.1 updates
2.1	Éclair	Galaxy S/3/5, Moto XT3, Xperia X8/X10, HTC Legend
2.2	Froyo	Nexus One, HTC Desire, LG Optimus One
2.3	Gingerbread	Announced, Will be available by early 2011 with launch of Nexus S
3.0	Honeycomb	Not formally announced, demoed on Moto tablet, Available by 2011 end.

Android Screen Resolution:

Resolution	Rating	Devices
QVGA – 240x320 WQVGA – 240x400, 240x430	LOW	Samsung Galaxy 5 / 3, HTC Wildfire,
HVGA – 320x480	MEDIUM	Moto XT3, LG Optimus One
WVGA – 480x800	HIGH	Nexus One, HTC Desire, Samsung Galaxy S

So running through the list of requirements I had, when the Optimus One was announced, I found an almost perfect match. You can check it out here: http://bit.ly/i07mau It retails for about Rs.13,000. I got mine for Rs.12,600 at Devendra Telecom. The best deal around presently is Rs. 12,990 at Total along with a free pair of Reebok shoes. I've had the device for a little over a week and here are my impressions so far:

The Positives:

• The phone's build quality is amazing. It has rubberized plastic and metal around the edges. Feels very solid unlike other 'budget' phones and the rubberized plastic also serves to provide grip and avoids fingerprints. The design is very simplistic with just the power and volume keys along with android buttons at the bottom. The only ports are the 3.5mm music jack and a micro USB which serves as charging port too. Overall great design. Some might call it bland but it grows on you.
• The touchscreen is a 3.2 inch capacitive affair. Its not Gorilla Glass (like the Nokia N8 or the Moto XT3) but comes with some kind of screen guard pre-installed. The screen is very responsive but showed some lag initially. This was more to do with the 600Mhz processor being loaded than the screen itself. I installed LauncherPro to replace the LG Home stock UI and cut down the home screens to 3 and the lag is almost completely gone! Turns out the LG UI is not the fastest and having too many home screens with too many widgets saps your processor. I would recommend LauncherPro (available in the Market) for all Android phones. For more tips and tricks on speeding up your Android click here: http://lifehac.kr/fF3w15
• The phone comes with 512 MB of RAM which is on par with top end phones like the the Nexus One, Galaxy S, etc. There is no question of running out of RAM and there is no need to run Task Killers. Android manages memory in a way very different from what we know in Windows. Read about it here: http://lifehac.kr/cg8qb0
• The phone came with LG keyboard as default and was a pain to use. But thankfully the stock Android keyboard is very much there and all I needed to do was set that as the default and I was back in business.
• The phone's sound quality, both in call and for music playback on speaker-phone or headphone is top-notch.
• The GPS is real nifty and gets a satellite lock in no time! This was definitely a big move up from the GPS on the Nokia 5800 for me. The phone comes pre-loaded with Google maps but since they have yet to introduce turn-by-turn voice navigation in India, there is also a voice navigation app called Ndrive installed. The maps initially reside in the 2GB card that comes bundled with the phone and you can choose the India map when you install it. Be careful if you are upgrading to a bigger size memory card and make sure to copy all the contents of the 2GB card before you junk it. Ndrive is not as user friendly or polished as Nokia's Ovi maps but is functional and its nice to know that a 'budget' phone comes with a free navigation solution. (At least until Google's navigation launches here anyway!)
• If you are listening to music using a headset and yank it out from the phone, the music player pauses playback and prevents the sound from playing on the phone's loudspeaker. This can prevent embarrassment if you are in a quiet place (at work or a library for example) and accidentally pull out the headset from the phone.
• The phone uses the same micro USB port for both data transfer and charging. So when you are copying music from your computer, you don't have to worry about your phone dying because it is also simultaneously charging!
• The phone supports Divx and Xvid video formats. Which means you can copy all your DVD rips and other videos directly onto your memory card and the phone will play them as they are with no need for any conversion! The 600Mhz is quite up to the job. Initially there was some stutter when playing full length videos, but after a few tweaks that freed up the processor (installing launcher pro and reducing the number of home screens to 3) the videos play flawlessly!

The Negatives:

• The phone's camera is a 3MP affair and takes decent photos but lacks an LED flash. This obviously limits the use of camera in low light and one wonders how much money LG saved by leaving out a simple LED from the handset!
• Also the lack of camera flash means that one would have difficulty in using the phone as a torch. (There are several apps available in the Market that allow users to turn the LED into a torch for use during power outages.) But there are apps that can use the screen to provide a glow that kinda overcomes this issue.
• The phone accepts a normal 3.5mm headset to output audio and the sound quality is great. But plugging in a regular headset disables the phone's microphone. So if you are using a headset other than the one bundled with the phone and you get a call while listening to music, you can hear the person talking at the other end but they cant hear you until you unplug the headset. This is a real bummer! What is even more surprising is that even when using other headsets with an in-line Mic (I tried out my Nokia 5800's headset with music remote) neither the phone Mic or the headset's Mic works! I'm not sure as of yet if there is an app that can overcome this or if there is a software fix that will roll out in the future. But for ease of use, I would advise that you stick with the stock headphones that come with the phone. But some people who connect the phone to their car stereo's aux input would find this to be an issue.
• The phone does not have an ambient light sensor. So if you have set the display brightness to the lowest level, you will find it hard to read in sunlight / bright light. But thankfully you can use the Android Power Control widget to manually adjust the brightness (there are 3 levels of control) and when you crank up the brightness, there are no issues with readability.

Tweaks that I have implemented and apps I have installed to improve usability and performance:

• Installed LauncerPro. This is one of the best home screen apps available for Android and is better than most of the custom UIs that ship with todays Android devices. The interface is highly customizable and provides a noticeable increase in speed of operation. It also frees up the load on the 600Mhz processor and as a result you see better overall performance on the device. LauncherPro also allows you to enable landscape mode on the homescreen and virtual looping on homescreens.
• Reduced the number of homescreens to 3. The LG launcher allows you to choose only between 5 and 7 homescreens. By having lesser number of homescreens and only essential widgets running, you can minimize processor usage and increase overall phone performance and battery life.
• Installed Tweetdeck. The phone comes preloaded with Facebook and Twitter apps. But Tweetdeck allows you to integrate Facebook, Twitter and Buzz into one place and do common status and photo updates and also shows you all the friend updates from all three portals in a common timeline. In addition to the convenience of using a single app for all your social networking needs, this also means that your phone uses less data and battery by having just one app syncing data instead of multiple apps.
• Installed Emergency Light. This is an app that provides a white screen with full brightness to use as a torch. Works pretty well in the absence of an LED on the phone.
• Installed No Lock. When enabled, this app prevents the screen from locking once the display times out and goes blank. It saves you from the trouble of having to unlock the phone each time if you are say, sitting at your work desk.
• Installed Dropbox. I cant say this enough. Dropbox is an awesome file syncing software that runs on Windows, Max, Linux, iPhone / iPad and Android. Basically it allows you to have a common folder with synchronized contents across all the devices that you own. Plus, it saves a copy on the dropbox server, so you can access it using a web browser from any computer. Get it using this link: https://www.dropbox.com/referrals/NTIwMzI2NjI5?src=global0 and you can help me earn referral points! :)

Thats it really! For its price, the LG Optimus One is the best hardware you can get and its truly great value for money. One can spend twice the amount of money or more and buy a flagship android device like the Galaxy S or HTC desire. You will end up with a slightly bigger better screen (Super AMOLED, 3.5 – 4 Inch) and a faster processor (1Ghz) but in the end it is entirely up to you if you want to put down extra cash for those benefits. For normal every day use the Optimus One is a real winner!