Review: LG Optimus Black (P970)

At the time of its release, the LG Optimus Black featured some pretty cutting edge technology. Since it landed on South African shores, more impressive devices have arrived, but the Optimus Black hasn’t been put to pasture. There must be some reason the Red Bull Mobile decided to add this specific phone to its arsenal. After living with the device for a week or two, we think we know why.

It's an unassuming black slab.

Physical Features
The LG Optimus Black is an unassuming black slab, measuring in at 122 × 64 × 9.2 mm. This isn’t a bad thing. The metal-rimmed glass front, which is met by a tapered soft-touch, textured plastic back, looks good without trying too hard. At 109g, the device is light, but still manages to feel substantial in hand.

The entire front end of the device is a sheet of Corning’s Gorilla glass, with the display joined by a silver LG logo, front camera and the usual pair of proximity and light sensors along the top. Along the bottom of the display there are four backlit capacitive buttons – in yet another unique arrangement. LG’s order is Menu, Home, Back, Search. As always, we prefer proper hardware buttons, but the haptic feedback and nice blue light that confirms a tap are nice touches that make Optimus Black’s buttons easier to live with.

The back is quite bare, with the camera and an LED flash top left, and LG/Google branding here and there. Sure, it’s plastic, but LG have managed to make it feel durable and, tied with the rest of the device, it doesn’t feel cheap at all.

Display
LG claims that the Optimus Black’s 4-inch NOVA display, which has a resolution of 480×800 pixels (~233ppi), is the world’s brightest 4-inch IPS LCD. A bold claim, and one that we are in no position to discredit. What we can tell you is that it is pretty bright. Bright enough, in fact, to comfortably use outside. Contrast is good for an LCD display, colours are vivid, and text is crisp enough.

It’s definitely one of the better displays we’ve laid eyes on, and one we’d be perfectly happy living with.

The display is pretty bright.

Performance and Battery Life
The LG Optimus Black is powered by a workhorse that has proved its worth time and time again: a 1 GHz Cortex-A8 processor. Here, it’s paired with a PowerVR SGX530 GPU on a TI OMAP 3630 chipset. This combo is backed by 512MB of RAM. Just enough, in our opinion.

Sure enough, the Optimus Black performed exactly as expected. There wasn’t any noticeable interface lag, and it handled a large variety of applications, from simple note-taking, to 3D games, without really breaking a sweat. That being said, it also never really felt like things were flying. We got the impression that the hardware was performing adequately. Nothing more, nothing less. The software, as you’ll read a bit later, may be to blame.

Storage wise, there’s 2GB available internally (with 1GB available to you, the user, for applications and such). This can, as always, be exapnded with microSD, up to an additional 32GB.

One thing that did impress was the 1500mAh Li-Ion battery. We managed to get just over two days of real-world use on a single charge.

Camera
The 5 megapixel auto-focus camera on the back of the Optimus Black is a nice little spur-of-the-moment point-and-shoot stand-in. With enough light, photos are good with little noise, but colours seem a bit flat. One nice thing is that the LED flash isn’t so bright that it will blow out your pictures, but this also means that it isn’t very useful to light anything further than a meter away.

The LG Optimus Black was the first Android device to feature a 2MP front-facing camera. This worked well for quick self-portraits to check if you look presentable, as well as for video-chatting.

Everything Else
We should probably have some boilerplate text for this section stowed away somewhere. Yep, all the bells and whistles we’ve come to expect from Android devices are all here. Fairly accurate assisted-GPS that locked quickly. Bluetooth 2.1 with A2DP and EDR that talked to my car kit just fine. WiFi (b/g/n), and HSDPA/HSUPA 3G radios. Proximity and light sensors. All here, all working without a hitch.

Software
It doesn’t matter that the Optimus Black runs Android 2.2 (an upgrade to 2.3 is close, apparently) – this version of Android does what it needs to do. The second version of the Optimus UI that sits on top of Android is what got our attention (and not in a good way).

By this time our opinion of manufacturer customization is common knowledge (tip: we’re not overly fond of it). Optimus UI 2.0 makes us wish that LG hadn’t bothered. It feels like they took bits and pieces from well-known sources, stuck them together, changed little things here and there just to make it look like they put a bit of effort into the whole affair, stood back and said: “Eh. Good enough.”

We’re sorry, but highlights and colour cues from CyanogenMod, a keyboard that looks, works, and sounds exactly like the iPhone’s, a launcher that feels like TouchWiz 0.5, and bits and pieces of user interface elements from all over the show is a bit too obvious. When you use elements that work, but aren’t necessarily the best out there, and haphazardly glue them together, you get the half-arsed attempt that lives on the Optimus Black. The strange thing is that this doesn’t make the device a nightmare to use. Obviously, it isn’t a joy to use either. It is, you guessed it, adequate. Nothing more. Nothing less. It does what it does without frills, without drawing attention to itself, and it’s perfectly happy with this.

The usual smattering of uninstallable applications with far better alternatives in the Android Market are also present. We couldn’t tell whether the Facebook and Twitter clients, for example, were very old official versions customized by LG, or badly written in-house versions. Either way, we couldn’t last more than a day with them.

The good news is that the Optimus Black is rootable, so you can get rid of the applications that you don’t want. The bad news is that there isn’t much of a custom ROM community yet. Work is being done on porting CyanogenMod, but it’s still early days.

Conclusion
Believe it or not, the LG Optimus Black fills a gap. It’s an affordable, solid, relatively powerful, reliable device. Sure, we don’t like what LG has done with Android, but what it comes down to is that this is the perfect device to introduce someone to the Android faction of smartphones. Even if it’s uninspired, the interface is familiar and functional.

The Optimus Black is a good phone, there’s no doubt about it. There are better phones out there, sure, but if this device is one of your choices on a new contract, or in your price range, you can do much worse.

Build Quality: 8/10
Performance and Responsiveness: 7/10
Aesthetics: 7/10
Display: 8/10

Score: 7/10