LG Optimus Black Review

Introduction:

We are not really sure why this happens, but every time we have to review a new slim and sexy device for you, we feel a heartwarming blend of excitement and anticipation. Such is the case with the LG Optimus Black, which we are holding in our itching hands today. The smartphone captured our attention right out of the box with its thin waistline measuring a mere 9.2 millimeters making it officially one of the thinnest Android devices we have ever come across. Furthermore, the beautiful 4-inch NOVA display has already impressed us with its unprecedented brightness of up to 700 nits – enough to outshine all its current IPS-LCD and AMOLED competition. But does everything look as pretty on the inside as it does on the outside? Well, it is time to find out!

Design:

It doesn't take a second look to figure out that the LG Optimus Black has been designed for the style-conscious audience in mind. Its thickest section measures only 0.36 inches (9.2 millimeters), which is a guarantee that the smartphone will never be noticed in your pocket. Its weight of 3.84 ounces (109 grams) seems to be spot on for a device of its size – the handset feels neither too light, nor too heavy in the hand. Such a small figure was achieved greatly thanks to the all-plastic body of the smartphone, which means that die-hard fans of solid metal constructions might want to look away now. We do agree that adding some premium materials would have added a great dose of style to the handset, but this would have also taken a toll on its weight, so we accept the Optimus Black's plastic outfit just the way it is. Despite its name, the LG Optimus Black will not come in black only – a white and a pink versions are expected to be seen as early as next month.



You can compare the LG Optimus Black with many other phones using our Size Visualization Tool.

The overall design of the LG Optimus Black is rather minimalistic with no unnecessary buttons or lights anywhere in sight. The four capacitive touch-sensitive buttons underneath the display change their color from pure white to neon blue each time you press them. That nice little touch goes to show the attention to detail the Optimus Black has been honored with. Video calls are made possible thanks to the 2-megapixel front-facing camera, which is located next to the nearly unnoticeable earpiece.


Flip the phone around and you will see a matte plastic back cover protecting the LG Optimus Black's battery and internal components. The 5-megapixel auto-focus camera and the tiny single speaker become apparent as well. Also, we cannot miss commenting on the slightly curved edges on the back of the smartphone – a characteristic dubbed C-curve by LG that not only reduces the device's slim profile even further, but also adds a nice comfortable grip to it.


Taking a closer look at the LG Optimus Black's left side reveals something that LG calls the G button. It is located right under the volume rocker and enables the phone's interface to be interacted with by tilting or rotating the device, but we will go through all of its functions a little later. Charging the LG Optimus Black's battery is done via the microUSB port located on top of the device under a sliding cover. Right next to it we find a 3.5 millimeter headphones jack, a tiny secondary microphone used for noise cancellation, and the smartphone's power/lock button.



NOVA display:

Pick the LG Optimus Black up, turn it on, and you will be greeted by a 4-inch IPS-LCD screen with 480x800 resolution – the NOVA display, as LG has decided to name it. What makes it so special that it needs to have its own name? Well, the NOVA technology that LG has incorporated in its screen makes it the brightest display ever installed on a smartphone so far. The maximum luminous output of the display clocks at the impressive 700 nits, or 700 candelas per square meter, if you will. In theory, that should make the NOVA display look brighter when compared to, let's say, the iPhone 4's display with its 500 nits of brightness, or next to most of the other smartphones, which average at  about 480 nits.

LG  states that 700 nits is the exact threshold for achieving perfect outdoor visibility, allowing the human eye to easily distinguish pictures even in direct sunlight. In reality, our outdoor tests showed that the Optimus Black's display remained clearly visible indeed, but we did not see any miracles out of it. The screen was bright just enough for reading emails, surfing the web, and navigating through the menu while being under direct sunlight even though we had to clean its surface from our fingerprints first. As far as viewing photos in a sunny day, you better find some shade before doing that. Otherwise, under normal lighting conditions, the display on the LG Optimus Black was noticeably brighter than other smartphones that we paired it with, including the iPhone 4 and the Samsung Galaxy S II, although the difference in brightness levels was not that huge.


The NOVA display technology is capable of delivering some very nice and deeply looking shades of black making photos and videos look quite lifelike. Whites are bright and warm, without a hint of showing blue or yellow tints. But blacks and whites are not everything – the entire color spectrum is vivid and intense though we might say that the reds tend to stand out too much. Overall, the colors are bright and impressive, feeling only a bit overly saturated. Photos and videos look clear and pleasing to the eye.

Of course, we cannot forget mentioning that the NOVA display is very energy efficient. According to LG, the NOVA technology allows for a greater amount of light to pass through, making the screen brighter without having to suck excessive amounts of power from the battery. Besides that, pixels that display black essentially turn themselves off thus draining exactly zero watts of power.

The NOVA display on the LG Optimus Black is one of the smartphone's main selling points, and we do agree that it performs great indeed. Let's move along and see if LG has put just as much effort in crafting their device on the inside like it has done on the outside.

Interface and Functionality:

The LG Optimus Black that we have today runs Android 2.2 out of the box with Optimus UI 2.0 added right on top of it. The all-familiar Froyo comes with a revamped homescreen management system, a slightly modified lock screen, and music controls conveniently added to the drop down menu – all Optimus UI 2.0 features common across LG's Optimus series. The Black comes with a gorgeous Flash-animated weather application and widget almost reaching the high threshold set by the ones from HTC. The weather app gets information from AccuWeather and gives you 15-day forecast, which is pretty neat.

Another feature that Optimus UI 2.0 delivers is the implementation of motion gestures. Just like on the LG Optimus 2X, tapping on the sides of the device can move the cursor when typing or browse through the image gallery. More that you can do with motion gestures is to turn off your alarm clock or to mute an incoming call by flipping the phone over. We can argue how useful these motion gestures can be in real life because the idea of physically hitting a pricy device, no matter how lightly you do it, can always cause an accidental drop if you are not being careful enough. Luckily, some or all of the motion gestures can be turned off through the Settings menu.

Although seeing the LG Optimus Black launch with Froyo on board will be somewhat disappointing to some, LG has stated that an upgrade to Gingerbread will be possible in the future, hopefully enabling video chat over that 2-megapixel front-facing camera. The interface on the Optimus Black runs smoothly almost all of the time, though we cannot deny noticing slight lags and delays every once in a while. Perhaps, the software on the smartphone has not been completely optimized for running on the 1GHz single-core TI OMAP 3630 mobile chipset, backed up by 512 MB of RAM. It is worth pointing out that this chipset is known for its energy efficiency rather than showing any outstanding computing power levels.

Being energy efficient does not necessarily mean that the LG Optimus Black cannot play any games. The PowerVR SGX 530 GPU should suffice for running not very demanding 3D games at decent frame rates. Nevertheless, do not expect breaking any benchmark records with this device. Our Quadrant scores rarely exceed 1300 points, which is about as much as the ten month old Motorola DROID X (updated to Froyo) would get. That should not come as a surprise really since both devices have the exact same OMAP 3630 chipset ticking inside them.


The LG Optimus Black offers only 1 gigabyte of internal storage, but the phone's capacity can be expanded with a microSD card of up to 32 gigabytes in size. Although LG has included a basic 2 gigabyte one in the set, you might want to consider upgrading it because it gets pretty crammed once you start shooting HD video and taking photos, not to mention the MP3s that you might want to carry around with you.. 

For those of you who like socializing on the go,  LG has not forgotten to implement clients to three of the most popular social networks – Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter. You can simply log in and start sharing photos and videos with your friends straight from the Optimus Black. Tweeting or sending messages to your buddies are easy tasks, especially with the Optimus UI 2.0's on-screen keyboard. It is fast, responsive, easy to get used to, and works well in both landscape and portrait modes.



G button:

The G button on the LG Optimus Black is something that we could probably live without. Its main functions include panning up or down, left or right when viewing photos in the gallery or when surfing the web, as well as switching between home screens – things that are easily done with one hand already. Another thing that it can do is to launch the smartphone's camera straight from the lock screen – that is done by holding down the button and shaking the device. The G button might have been intended for use in those situations when you simply do not want to touch the display and cover it with fingerprints, but believe us, you will have to sooner or later. You see, for some reason, the G button can switch between home screens, but it will not help you browse through the Applications list; it can help you navigate through your gallery, but it would not work when browsing your music library. Overall, the G button is mostly useful for showing off the LG Optimus Black to your friends. Using it on a regular basis is pointless.

Internet and Connectivity:

The web browser on the LG Optimus Black comes with full Adobe Flash support straight out of the box, which has to be its biggest advantage. However, handling heavy Flash content is a difficult task for the smartphone’s single-core CPU, and do not expect all videos embedded in web pages to play back smoothly. Nevertheless, casual web browsing is not a problem for the Optimus Black’s built-in browser – loading times are average and scrolling gets choppy only when a lot of objects are being rendered simultaneously.


Surfing the web from the LG Optimus Black while on the go is possible thanks to its 3G  radio capable of reaching 7.2 Mbps HSDPA and 5.76 Mbps HSUPA speed peaks, at least in theory. Such figures are not anything spectacular, of course, but should do the job for every day browsing and media streaming. Alternatively, you can use the built-in 802.11 b/g/n Wi-Fi radio for downloading larger files from the internet or apps from the Android Market.


What is really cool about the Optimus Black is that it supports Wi-Fi Direct connectivity with up to 8 other devices. This allows for files and data to be transfered between other Wi-Fi Direct-capable devices. The Wi-Fi Direct transfer speeds (up to 250 Mbps theoretically) are far greater than what the Black's Bluetooth 2.1 radio is capable of, and you do not need a router nor a hotspot! The Samsung Galaxy S II and certain high-end Blu-Ray players support the technology today, but it is expected future iterations of the protocol to require only one of the devices participating in the transfer to be Wi-Fi Direct-capable.  Another neat feature that you can use to share content wirelessly is SmartShare. Media stored on the Optimus Black can be browsed, viewed or played back on another device such as a TV with support for DLNA connectivity.

The A-GPS module on the LG Optimus Black took a minute and a half to find our location from a cold start. After that, each time we launched Google Maps again, our location was spotted within no more than 3 seconds.

Camera:

A nice touch to the camera's interface is that the on-screen buttons follow the handset's orientation. Browsing through the camera menu reveals that the camera on the Optimus Black supports both automatic and manual focus, face recognition, and sensor sensitivities from 100 ISO up to 800 ISO, which can be adjusted manually as well as automatically. There is no dedicated shutter key anywhere in sight, but that is not that much of an issue as the Black is not bragging to be a born shooter. It would have been nice to have an HDMI-out port for viewing content on an HDTV, but one has not been included by LG.


The 5-megapixel auto-focus main camera on the LG Optimus Black is nothing impressive, but it is suitable for taking a casual photo once in a while. Just make sure you have the suitable lighting conditions because the photos taken in dark environments are not going to impress you. The single LED flash does provide some level of illumination, but it also tends to make photos look too bright in the middle and too dark around the edges. The images taken with it in broad daylight look OK on the NOVA display, almost as if they have a very light soft focus filter applied to them. That hides away some imperfections like noise and artifacts, while making the image appear brighter overall. However, when viewing the photos on your computer's LCD screen, the colors look a bit dull and the dynamics are noticeably missing. As far as night shots go, well, they simply have a bit too much noise on them than we would tolerate.



The LG Optimus Black is capable of recording 720p HD videos at 30 frames per second in 3GP format. Pretty much, all that we said about the photo camera applies to the videos as well. As long as you have enough light around you, the footage is going to look decent. One strange thing that we noticed was that when videos taken in HD were played back on our computer, their aspect ratio was abnormally stretched horizontally. Trying a different media player did not make any difference. The glitch was not present with videos shot in lower resolutions, and fixing it with a software update should not be that hard (we guess).

LG Optimus Black Sample Video 1:



LG Optimus Black Sample Video 2:



LG Optimus Black Indoor Sample Video:




Multimedia:

The LG Optimus Black comes along with a wired headset that can be used during phone calls and to listen to music on the go. The sound quality that the earphones deliver is more than satisfactory from a stock pair – they sound loud and clear, and their rubber tips provide a  comfortable fit. The earphones also double as an antenna for the built-in FM Radio, which may always come in handy.

Using the Optimus UI 2.0's media player to listen to songs is pretty straightforward. All songs loaded on the smartphone are loaded into the playlist where they can be arranged in the order the user pleases. Flip the phone in landscape mode and you get a neat 3D like display of your media library, completed with album art and sorted alphabetically.


Playing back 720p HD video on the LG Optimus Black is a breeze using the stock Android video player, and they look pretty nice and smooth on the bright NOVA display. DivX and XviD formats are supported right out of the box, but H.264 videos were running without sound for some reason. We presume that this drawback can be easily avoided by getting an alternative media player from the Android Market.

If you wish to upload media to Facebook, Picasa, or YouTube, for example, this can be done straight from the gallery. Besides that, basic photo manipulations like rotating and cropping can be performed with only a few taps.

Performance:

We were very pleased with the in-call quality of the LG Optimus Black. Even during a conversation in a noisy environment, we could clearly understand what the other party was saying, and the same goes for them as well. The great sounding calls are probably backed up heavily by the secondary microphone, located on top of the smartphone, that provides a great deal of active noise reduction.

Our real life benchmark of the LG Optimus Black's 1500 mAh battery showed that the smartphone could last through an afternoon of frequent heavy usage, with Wi-Fi connectivity turned on and the screen's brightness turned up to the maximum. If you are using the smartphone with moderation –  browsing the web, checking your email, using the social networking clients, and maybe watching a YouTube video from time to time, then the LG Optimus Black should last you for at least 24 hours.

Conclusion:

Тhe LG Optimus Black is a decent smartphone that stands out with its wonderful 4-inch NOVA display and its slim waistline of 9.2 millimeters – features that the manufacturer has put most of its efforts into. It can be the perfect device for you if you do not insist on having the latest, most powerful, dual-core boasting smartphone on the market, but rather prefer using a slim Android device that will be a pleasure to look at and at the same time prove to be quite capable.

Although it is not the best shooter we've ever seen, the LG Optimus Black takes satisfyingly good looking photos and videos with its 5-megapixel camera, assuming it has been given the optimal conditions. When you have some time to kill, the Optimus Black can come in handy allowing you to watch 720p video on its vivid NOVA display. TI's single-core OMAP 3630 chipset is powerful enough for casual web browsing and will even run less demanding 3D games at good speeds. Thanks to its Adobe Flash-enabled browser, the smartphone delivers an enjoyable web browsing experience, although it can get choppy with some heavier web pages. In a nutshell, The LG Optimus Black can do most of the things that you would expect from a contemporary smartphone fairly well, which makes it a good all-purpose Android device.

If you are looking for a smartphone within the performance category of the LG Optimus Black, the HTC Incredible S will deliver a similar experience with an all-metal jacket adding an extra dose of style. However, being 39 grams heavier and 2 millimeters thicker, it does not quite have the slim profile and low weight of the LG Optimus Black. If you do not mind the plastic outfit and you insist on having a lightweight and slim device, you might want to check out T-Mobile’s Samsung Galaxy S 4G as well.

Software version of the reviewed unit:
Android - 2.2.2
Baseband Version - XMM6160
Kernel Version - 2.6.32
Build Number - FRG83G
Software version - LG-P970-V10a

LG Optimus Black Video Review: