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While we don't love the way the UI on the Optimus G looks, we do love how it works. This is one genuinely fast smartphone, powered by a new(ish) quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 Pro clocked at 1.5GHz and with 2GB RAM in support.
This speed and power is noticeable across the entire user experience, from the smooth and fluid animation, the fast app switching to the fact that the phone can essentially display three apps at one time.
That's right: three apps at once.
This is a feature LG calls QSlide. Basically there are a half-dozen QSlide enabled apps, including a browser, calendar, calculator, note-taker and video player. These apps can be launched over the time of any other app on the phone, and using sliders, the transparancy for these mini-apps can be adjusted so that everything onscreen is visible all at once.
For example, you could have a YouTube video open a Chrome browser window, while you scan a favourite website on the QSlide browser. Or you could be watching a video at 50% opacity while playing Candy Crush Saga underneath it.
Apparently this feature is big in Korea where DVB-H TV broadcasts are common and people are reluctant to miss a moment of their soap operas while replying to text messages. For the rest of us, it is a neat trick, but not something we found we used besides testing it.
LG include a 2100mAh capacity battery with the Optimus G, which is a decent sized battery, without being amazing. Battery life during our tests was 4.5-hours continuous web browsing on a Wi-Fi connection -- which is pretty good. Anecdotally, we saw a solid day's worth of battery during the business week, but no more.
