LG Optimus One P500 - Review

“The phone does an OK job considering its price tag. But its cheap housing, dodgy camera and generally low-quality spec mean your money could be better spent elsewhere”

Google Android without the price tag

LG's Optimus One P500 is cheap and cheerful

The LG Optimus One P500 is a cheap and cheerful Google Android smartphone designed to offer most of the features available on top-end smartphones, such as the iPhone 4. Except with one crucial difference - a considerably lower price tag.

Optimus One is free on pay-monthly contracts starting at around £15. Pay-as-you-go (PAYG) customers need to pay around £150 for the phone, but that’s still cheap when you consider that similar quality PAYG phones, such as the HTC Wildfire, could set you back over £200.

LG has kept manufacturing costs down on the smartphone by cutting back on some design aspects. For example, the phone has a cheap plastic body and low-quality touchscreen.

Having said that, the touchscreen was more responsive than I expected - more so than the truly awful one on last year’s LG's Optimus GT540. Selecting keys from Optimus One’s on-screen keypad was usually pretty quick and accurate, for instance.

At 3.2in the display was too small for my liking. You may be able to put up with it most of the time, but when viewing webpages or using Google Maps for navigation the small screen made things difficult to see clearly.

Cost-conscious parts

The phone is lightweight

Speaking of navigation, the Optimus One works well as both a pavement-based route-finder and an in-car satnav. I wouldn’t ditch my TomTom iPhone app for the LG phone, but its turn-by-turn navigation and voice-activated command tool (when it heard me correctly) proved handy.

LG’s fitted the smartphone with a considerably slower processor - another cost cutting move - than most high-end smartphones, such as the Google Nexus S. The drawback is that apps often took longer to load than I’d have liked - up to around two seconds longer.

Android’s online app store - Android Market - is continually growing and I sometimes find it difficult to sort the best apps from the chaff. So I was pleased to discover a pre-installed LG app - “App Advisor” - that helped me cherry pick useful apps from the Android store.

Cost-cutting is also evident when it comes to Optimus One’s camera which is, put simply, awful.

Every test shot was either fuzzy around the edges or had a cloudy smear over it. Pre-set shooting modes, such as portrait, which are supposed to help improve image quality under certain conditions, even failed to improve things.

Apps-a-plenty

Pictures were blurred and cloudy

It’s worth noting that the phone’s camera doesn’t have a flash, so pictures will often be quite dark if snapped without lots of surrounding light.

A decent variety of music formats (including MP3 and WMA) are supported on the LG Optimus One and moving files onto the phone from a PC is a synch - just connect the pair over USB and then drag and drop.

You’ll need to keep an eye on the phone’s battery power though, because I noticed that charge levels dropped by around 50% after just two or three hours.

Find your perfect LG Optimus One deal

---

Compare Phone Plan: PAYG Monthly

Compare Compare contracts costing up to: £5