LG Optimus G (AT&T) review

With its beefy stats, big and beautiful display and 4G capability, the Optimus G is easily the most powerful phone LG has ever produced. We'd even say its the best Lucky Goldstar has made to date. The question is, is it worth reccomending among the other 4G smartphone avaialble on AT&T?

We liked

That hardware. If you're picking the Optimus G's best asset, it's a toss up between the internal specs and awesome display. A quad-core processor and an impressive 2GB of RAM makes playing games, browsing the web or just flicking across home screens smooth and downright fun. With all that memory, the browser can handle a dozen or so tabs with ease and the latest games are no sweat either.

The screen is big and sharp, making pictures and videos gorgeous. All that visual real estate is great for gaming, and even makes the Optimus G a decent e-reader substitute.

LG's UI is also nice. It compliments that standard Android 4.0: Ice Cream Sandwich nicely, allowing you to resize and customize app icons and widgets. Also, we won't be waiting long for that Android 4.1: Jelly Bean update, it arrives in December.

AT&T's 4G service, while not cheap, is very good. It was fast, reliable and most importantly, available in our area. The AT&T version of the Optimus G also sports a removable SIM card and a microSD slot. Add that to the 32GB of internal storage and you've got a truly high capacity device.

The battery also impressed us. While it's nothing phenomenal, it had decent longevity for a quad-core device, which is essential since it's not removable.

We disliked

Some of the software, mainly all the AT&T bloatware jammed in this device. One or two of those apps, like the AT&T navigator widget, are worth your time, but the rest is junk.

The camera didn't impress us much. It's not bad, just not great. Despite the nice high contrast colors, you'll never take a picture that would be mistaken for anything but a cell phone shot. We didn't like making manual adjustments to improve indoor and low-light shots.

The size of the Optimus G will certainly be divisive. While we like big phones, a handset this large (5.19-inches long) won't please everyone, and neither with its plastic-feeling body. It might be made of polycarbonate Gorilla Glass, but it feels like plastic all the way.

The phone's speaker quality was not impressive. Calls often had static or buzz, and we were always tweaking the volume to compensate. The speaker phone suffered from similar issues.

Finally, the use of the AT&T Address Book often annoyed us. It would occasionally have to load before opening, and our inability to pinpoint when and why it would do this was a real flaw.

Verdict

We quite like the Optimus G. We're confident saying it's the best LG phone we've seen yet. The specs are tremendous, and it manages to have a big display, quad-core processor and 4G LTE without terrible battery life.

However, the phone falls just short of greatness due to a somewhat dated OS and carrier bloatware. We're glad to know that Jelly Bean is on the way, but having it out of the box would have been fantastic. The amount of carrier software that can't be uninstalled is egregious, and most of these apps are rendered moot by other onboard programs, like AT&T Navigator compared to Google Maps.

At $200 with two-year AT&T contract ($549 without) the Optimus G it's a lot of horsepower for the money. It's worthy of being called a flagship device for LG, and we look forward to updating this review once it makes the leap the Jelly Bean.