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The LG P690 and Android Gingerbread (review)
The LG P690 and Android Gingerbread (review)
4:00pm, Wednesday, February 22, 2012
Current mood: exhausted 
Well it's been a couple of years since I bought my last smart phone: the Nokia 5630, which in many respects served me well, yet in other ways was a pain in the arse. The Nokia 5630 was a small, non-touchscreen device running Symbian 60 v3, but it sported many of the features offered by today's smart phones, such as: Music Player, Bluetooth, Wifi, Picture Gallery, Web Browser, 3MP Camera, Email, USB MSD access and numerous downloadable apps created for the Symbian platform. The screen was small and non-touch, but overall the phone was a bargain at the price. Considering its size and price it was amazing what it could do. Apart from the shortcomings of its hardware the biggest problem with that phone was the Symbian platform, which was simply awful. Symbian apps would crash, system functions would work poorly, support was useless, there were glaring inadequacies left right and centre and it was absolutely NO SURPRISE when Nokia admitted defeat and threw the whole Symbian thing into the garbage bin. Every time the 5630 let me down I would curse Nokia and long for the day when I would buy an Android.
I knew it would be a bad idea to buy an early version of Android, so I waited until it was apparent that the platform was approaching maturity, there was a large user base and a large pool of quality free apps. As was the case with the previous phone I declined to spend a lot of money and restricted my options to models under $200. I ignored options with plans attached, preferring the freedom of a fully unlocked device that I could use as I wished. Sure, I could have bought a Galaxy Note with a 5.3" screen, dual-core 1.4 GHz ARM Cortex-A9 processor, 8MP camera and 2500mAh battery... but it would have cost 3 times the price. For that matter I could have bought an iPhone for 4 times the price... but my mission was to see what I could get for under $200.
After 2 weeks of research and price checking I opted for the LG P690 aka, the Optimus Spirit, the Optimus Net, the Optimus Link and any other damn-fool moniker the idiotic marketing branch of LG could come up with. You can read a full breakdown of the specs here, but the main features are as follows: 3.2" capacitive touchscreen (320 x 480 pixels), 800 MHz ARM 11 processor, Adreno 200 GPU, Android v2.3.3 (Gingerbread), Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n, Wi-Fi hotspot functionality, 3G, Bluetooth, GPS, Accelerometer, Proximity sensor, Compass, 1500 mAh battery and 16GB micro SD card. I got all this from Hong Kong for $224AU delivered. Not the flashest unit in the class but A REAL BARGAIN!
The LG P690.
The body feels a bit cheap and plasticy, but so what? This is in no way affects the functionality, only the price. The phone is well laid out with a minimum of extraneous buttons for you to accidentally hit and throw your usage into confusion. There are the 4 standard outboard buttons under the screen: Menu, Home, Back and Search and the only others are the volume keys at the top left and the power off key at the top. A nicely efficient and restrained layout, where the worst that's likely to happen when you grab the device is that the volume will decrease. I also like the restrained simplicity of the all black case with only a simple LG logo to distract you from the screen and the 4 main buttons.
As always with hand held devices, when it comes to the screen: bigger is better! In this respect the Optimus Spirit is a bit lacking. 3.2" is really a bit smaller than I wanted, but it was the biggest I could get for the price. Apart from that, the colour is accurate and strong (a little too saturated actually), and the screen is twice the size of my last phone! It's a lovely display when viewed inside.
Outside in the sun it fades away badly. If you turn the brightness up to maximum you can just about read it, but it's not good. If you need a phone that performs well in bright sun this is NOT your beast. Under overcast skies there's no problem.
The 800 MHz processor with it's added GPU runs Gingerbread just fine. No doubt the 512MB of RAM helps considerably here. Yes, the phone will slow down if you run multiple demanding apps concurrently, but if you keep it to just one or two apps at a time you shouldn't notice much in the way of delays. The touch screen is generally quite responsive and documents and pictures should flip across the screen quite smoothly at the end of your finger.
The camera is the WORST camera I've ever used!!! Truly, really, ABYSMAL! I don't want to hear any excuses along the lines of: "It's only a cheap phone" or "It's only 3MP". The 5630 was cheap and 3MP, yet it's photos were quite usable. The P690's alas, for anything other than low-res viewing are unacceptable! I don't say this lightly. I'm a serious photographer and I've used a lot of devices, scrutinised their output and processed and optimised the results. For this camera however, there is NO HOPE. Even at ISO 100 in full sun and processed with Adobe Lightroom the results are blotchy with poor colour and dynamic range. This stuff is incurable and I consider the camera to be so poor as to be NOT WORTH USING! I would only use it for some rare event that I simply must capture, when there is really no other way. The problem is primarily the heavy handed noise reduction blurring that you cannot turn off. This the worst part of an otherwise excellent convergent device. It's a pity really, because if LG had offered RAW capture as an option I could probably have got some useful results from the tiny sensor.
Some outdoor test shots, click to examine in full resolution. Excessive NR and poor dynamic range should be obvious, and this is AFTER processing in Lightroom!
Now to get down to the really important part of this review: Android Gingerbread. First the Operating System itself. I have found that it DOES crash from time to time, probably every couple of days, depending on what I am doing. This is rather more than I would have expected from a Unix based OS and I can only assume that LG's hardware drivers are a tad flaky. Other than that, I find the multitasking to be quite smooth although the task manager interface is really not good enough. The Running Apps widget is a great thing to have on your home page and it allows you to easily kill any apps that are running, BUT IT DOESN'T ALLOW YOU TO SWITCH TO THEM!!! How stupid is that? You can switch to a running app by clicking the normal shortcut icon but this is a pain to do if that icon is on some other page or nested in some folder. You can also hold down the home key to get a list of recently opened apps and you can then press the one to want to switch to. So if they could do that from the menu key, why the hell couldn't they do it from the task manager? 
With Gingerbread, most, but not all, apps you can download allow you to install them to the SD card, which beats the hell out of leaving them on the VERY LIMITED phone storage, which would soon fill up and prevent you installing any more apps. This is excellent, BUT, when the phone boots, Gingerbread has to run around your SD card, reconstructing all the app lauching details until your desktop looks and works the way it did last time it was turned on. THIS PROCESS TAKES SOME MINUTES! WTF!!! Gingerbread also gives you the ability to connect your SD card as a MSD with USB connection, so you DON'T need to install the manufacturer's pain-in-the-arse PC Suite to transfer files across. This is great, but you can't use the SD card on the phone while you're connected, or any app installed there, and after you disconnect, the OS has to run around reconstructing all the app icons, same as it does on boot up. TEDIOUS!
Gingerbread also lacks the ability to take a screenshot. I gather this has been rectified in IceCreamSandwich, but that's not much help to the Gingerbread Man. The Android Keyboard is something you will see a lot of and it's quite good. Unfortunately on a touchscreen this size my fingers are just a bit too big for accurate typing, even in the landscape mode. One thing that puzzles me however is the predictive text: Only people's names from my contact list are offered as options. Where are all the standard dictionary words? Searching the internet, this appears to be a bug in this SW version. Not impressed Google! It appears the only solution is to install a 3rd party keyboard. Humpf! 
The above gripes are pretty minor really, and everything else about the OS is really very good. The App Manager makes installing and uninstalling a snap and so far has been flawless. The Android Market is well integrated into the OS and is simple, effective and a joy to use. The pull down bar is great for quickly turning your devices on and off. The settings menu which is also the menu for the home page, is comprehensive and easy to use. One oversight however is the ability to set ALL the system sounds to an MP3 of your choice. Sure, you can easily set the ring tone, but what about the alarm, the Email, the SMS etc. As far as I can see your options are limited to their list. Speech recognition is deeply integrated into the platform and I found it to be quite accurate and much faster than typing on the little keyboard. If you leave a short gap between each word and speak naturally it is really VERY accurate. Amazing! 
There are a great many other things about this OS which work so naturally that one tends to take them for granted and I'm not even going to mention them here. And IMO that's the way an OS should be! Apple have made an awful lot of money on the back of their slogan that it "just works", (which is a lie BTW). Well, Android can pretty much say the same thing, (although there are exceptions), at least as far the OS goes...
Android OS. Mostly good.
Now to the Android stock apps that come preinstalled. If Android devices were to be judged against iPhones by their stock look and feel they would lose hands down! THE STOCK APPLICATIONS ARE SECOND RATE! Yes, they work, but only at a simple level, and I find it difficult to believe that major manufacturers like LG, Samsung and Sony-Ericsson could allow such tripe to go to market.
Let's start with the number 1 culprit: the stock Browser. Considering this is built on Webkit, which was developed by Apple and Google amongst others, you would think it would be pretty good... but it ain't! Firstly, you can't remove the wasteful bottom bar which chews up 15% of the screen real estate in landscape mode, nor can you remove the system bar which takes another 10%. With the status bar at the top (removable but it keeps coming back), you're down to not much more that 50% of the screen available for actual content! Now that, Google, is UNACCEPTABLE! This particular oversight would be easily fixed, so why don't they fix it? I'll tell you why: because Google have lost the plot, and can no longer program their way out of a wet paper bag! Other than that, font sizes don't always behave as one would expect, often some fonts are too small to read even with option set to "close", while other fonts are fine. Fortunately, all these problems can be solved by installing the excellent Dolphin browser. I don't give too many raps to commercial products, but this is truly a beauty!
The stock browser screen real estate usage. Almost 50% lost!
Next piece of tripe is the stock Gallery. Yes, it will display your pictures and it impressed me by automatically linking to my Picasa albums, but it is COMPLETELY UNUSABLE for the following reasons: You can't turn off which folders the damn thing indexes and it will sit there and index every bloody image file on your SD card and your online account every time you fire it up, which will take some considerable time. Furthermore it assigns a separate album to every directory so that for every music directory that has a jpg in it, it creates another album in its home screen. So if you have 100 music albums with 1 piece of artwork in each, and say 20 online Picasa albums and 20 photo albums on your SD card, then the stock browser will put 140 separate albums on your screen every time you turn it on... good luck navigating through that stupidity. This might be ok if you could just tell it which folders to index and which to ignore, but you can't! FUCKING STUPIDITY! Clearly the cretins who wrote this never bothered to use it. Again, fortunately we have the wonderful Android Market where one can pick up a replacement for nothing! In this case I found the excellent QuickPic to be just what I needed. It just works the way one might want. Lovely! 
The stock gallery photo album selection. Page 5 of 20. 1 pic to each album. Absolute stupidity!
The stock Email ain't sooo bad, but it is a tad clumsy, with over large fonts and not quite enough customisability for serious use. The POP3 client is mostly ok, but it doesn't fully sync with the server, meaning that if an Email is deleted on the server it will still appear in the inbox until you delete it from there. If you use IMAP you are asking for trouble, read why here. Not bad, but not good enough for me, so I installed the excellent K9 mail for free. Nice work guys! 
Moving right along, we have the stock Calendar, which again, isn't so bad, but it does have a couple of problems. 1 - Like the Email client, the sync with your server, (in my case Google Calendar), only seems to go one way. If an event is deleted on the server it is NOT deleted in the app. 2 - The widget that comes with it is large, ugly and lacking customisability. I solved these problems by installing Business Calendar which offers all the customisability one could want.
One of the most serious problems with the second rate stock applications is the Music Player, which apart from offering bugger all customisability DOESN'T HAVE AN EQUALISER!!! Now I don't know about you, but it is my experience that most headphones and speakers that you might connect to any mobile phone do NOT exhibit satisfactory frequency response. This means that most headphones and speakers will produce poor quality sound when connected to the phone unless you have an equaliser to correct these deficiencies. It's no big deal, most MP3 players on computer or mobile phone have had equalisers for years. But not the Optimus Spirit! Again, it boggles my mind and boils my blood! FUCKING IDIOTS! What were they thinking? So because some brainless moron decides to leave out 1 feature, my entire music appreciation on this phone is wrecked forever? FUCK OFF! 
Fortunately salvation is available with the excellent PowerAmp Pro, which solved all my music issues straight off the bat. A wonderful product, and just what I wanted, although it cost almost $5.
The Poweramp Equaliser and Player screens. Perfect!
The final problem with the stock applications is that they are PERMANENTLY integrated into the Android setup, perhaps it is only as part of the LG skin, but the fact remains that unless you root your phone you CANNOT GET RID OF THEM! It is the stock apps that appear in the pull down bar, it is the stock apps that can display during the screen lock, and it is the stock apps that will be triggered by other apps. You can hide their shortcut but you cannot uninstall them and you cannot stop them appearing from time to time. Ah well... This is only a minor nuisance and I guess I can live with it.
I can't finish this review without some mention of power consumption and battery recharge frequency. THE POWER CONSUMPTION DOES SEEM EXCESSIVE. My previous phone had only an 860mAh battery yet the time between recharges was longer than this Optimus Net, which has almost double the capacity! Even if you don't use the phone and turn off the GPS, Bluetooth and Wifi, Cell Standby and Phone Idle will still ensure your battery is flat in 2 days. I can't see why this should be, since the little Nokia 5630 lasted longer than this with half the battery. If you use the phone heavily, say... listening to music with Bluetooth headphones, while you browse the web with Wifi, and use the GPS, you will be lucky to get 4 hours of life. This is perhaps understandable, but in my opinion it is NOT LONG ENOUGH! I've checked out the battery saver apps, and yes, they can increase your time between recharges, BUT ONLY AT THE EXPENSE OF COMMUNICATIONS! These apps all turn off everything that they think isn't being used, such as GPS, Wifi and even Cellular Network. The upshot of this is that you don't receive calls, you find you're connecting to the internet with 3G instead of Wifi and your GPS simply doesn't work. These apps say that they will turn these services back on when they are needed, but the fact is that there is such a large delay before that service becomes operational again that it is effectively useless. The best power management is use the pull down menu to turn these things on and off manually. Sure it's a pain, but at least the phone will work properly. The ultimate solution to this problem, which I believe affects all Androids, is to use a larger battery. A 3000mAh battery would mean you could really hammer the device all day before needing to recharge, and light use would give you 4 days or so of life. I note that those clever Chinese aftermarket people are selling just that! Unfortunately the fatter battery means they also need to sell you a remodeled rear cover since it won't fit in the existing space. Good one dudes! That is the RIGHT IDEA!
A typical Battery Saver App and a double size aftermarket battery and cover plate.
So there you have it: Android Gingerbread is a decent OS, it doesn't crash too often, it is responsive and offers wonderful functionality, but ALL the stock applications are only good for the trash can! Unbelievable I call it! Absolutely NOTHING of the top software layer is worth a cracker! But there IS the Android Market, and this folks, is what makes the Android an irresistible platform for anyone who hates Apple or who simply can't afford an iPhone. All you have to do to make your Android shine is remove all the stock apps from the desktop and download quality replacements from the market. You don't even have to pay for most of them. (Although this does mean putting up with small ads from time to time.) TOO EASY!
The Android Market: Why an Android is worth buying!
So now I love my Android, 
and I have installed a great bunch of marvellous apps to do a multitude of things. I have many music albums on my SD card and many eBooks as well. It took a few weeks and a great deal of effort to fully master this new platform, but now that I have, I can cheerfully say that it was worth the trouble. Take my advice: ignore the stock apps, download the ones I have suggested, and you too, can laugh at the iPhone and blow your mind with the power of the Android!
Na Zdorovie!
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Tarnsman Of Gor by John Norman