Just got my LG Optimus G. My quick thoughts

Just got an LG Optimus G. Here are my quick thoughts on it.

Both the front and back are covered with Gorilla Glass. Apparently the back is polarized so it has an interesting pattern on it. Some how in my hand the finish makes it feel like plastic - maybe the sides have too much laquer on them or something. Still, it's a very solid phone.

The screen looks amazing. It's 4.7" 1280x720 display with amazing viewing angles. I just got it tonight so I haven't had a chance to use it outdoors in the sun yet.

The speaker on the back isn't very loud.

There are going to be 2 versions for the Canadian market. They differ in terms of LTE support. The Rogers one has 2600Mhz LTE only while the TELUS and Bell ones have AWS LTE (and probably other bands though I'm just speculating here).
While there's no MicroSD slot there's 32GB of storage of which 25GB is available so the lack of removable storage isn't a deal breaker.

Unlike Motorola which is trying to supply an almost vanilla version of Android, LG has tried to add some extra features. I don't have all the marketing names of these features in front of me so I'll just describe them.

First off, you can zoom in when you're looking at a video. As far as I know, you can't do this on any other phone. I guess it's useful if you're viewing full HD material. I'll try out later.

The camera has a neat feature where you can press the button and it shows five frames leading up to the shot. So, when this feature is activated I guess the G is constantly taking pictures and just shows you the last 5 frames when you shoot. It's a strange feature, I think it would be more useful if it allowed you to take more than 5 frames. There is a burst mode that's similar to the RAZR's. You have to switch to burst mode (instead of it always being on like the Note II or One X) and then you only press the button once. Then it takes 6 shots. First off it should take pictures for as long as you hold the button down and more importantly why can't it take more than 6 shots? The G has a cutting edge quad core processor, 2GB of RAM and 32GB of built-in storage. My guess is that this is a limitation from the international model which has a 13MP camera.

I haven't had a chance to pixel peep at my pictures yet so I'll comment on them later.

There's built in Mira-cast. Basically, if you get a Mira-cast dongle (or a fancy TV that has it built-in) you can stream what you see on the G onto your TV. I saw it in action and there was a half second delay on the TV plus it skipped occasionally so you wouldn't want to use it for gaming. A cooler feature is that you can play a video so that it shows on your TV and then use the Optimus G to do something else without stopping the video. Neat.

Finally, the last feature is the ability to take screen shots by pressing both volume buttons and then being able to write on them. Think of this, you're talking on the phone and have to write down a phone number. Press the volume buttons and then write it down. Then you can make them semi-transparent so you can see the note as you enter the number into your dialer later. Probably not a feature I would use all the time but it's still pretty neat.

I haven't gone through all the menus yet but I couldn't help noticing that there's a feature where the G watches your eyes to see if it should turn your screen off. Gee, I wonder where they got that idea from?

Without a doubt, hardware wise the Optimus G's most important feature is it's quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon APQ8064 processor. It lacks a modem which is probably why LG is able to supply a 2600Mhz LTE version. The processor features 4 Qualcomm Krait cores -the LTE versions of the GS3, One X and RAZR
all have 2 Krait cores. Processors like the quad-core Exynos in the Note II feature Cortex A9 cores. On paper the ARM-9 is a less efficient design. Here are some preliminary benchmarks comparing the G with the Note II, GS3 (LTE version), One X (Tegra version) and iPhone 5 when it's applicable.

SunSpider:
Apple iPhone 5: 911.7
Samsung Galaxy Note II: 1005.4
LG Optimus G: 1314.1
HTC One X (Tegra 3): 1550.9
Samsung Galaxy S III: 1781.5

The G's SunSpider score is a little disappointing. Then again, I only include SunSpider so we can compare Android phones with iPhones. Vellamo is a suite of browser tests so let's check that out.

Vellamo 2 HTML 5:
LG Optimus G: 1713
Samsung Galaxy Note II: 1841
Samsung Galaxy S III: 1630
HTC One X (Tegra 3): 1608


Vellamo 2 Metal:
LG Optimus G: 643
Samsung Galaxy Note II: 628
Samsung Galaxy S III: 580
HTC One X (Tegra 3): 492

Here the Note II edges out the Optimus G by a wisker in the HTML 5 portion while it wins the Metal by a small margin. Frankly, I'm a little surprised that the G doesn't do better given that it has 2 more of the GS3's processor cores. While I don't expect quad cores to double the score over dual cores, I was expecting a little more. I guess it's a case of diminishing returns when you go past 2 cores.

GL Benchmark 2.5 on-screen (frames per second):
LG Optimus G: 37
HTC One X (Tegra 3): 15
Samsung Galaxy Note II: 17
Samsung Galaxy S III: 21

While I expect the G to be faster than the other phones, its margin of victory is pretty amazing..

GL Benchmark 2.5 off-screen (frames per second):
LG Optimus G: 29
HTC One X (Tegra 3): 9.7
Samsung Galaxy S III: 13
Samsung Galaxy Note II: 17
Apple iPhone 5: 29

Here the G ties the iPhone 5 which is pretty astonishing. It's more than 3x faster than the One X, more than double the speed of the S III and nearly double the speed of the Note II. Wow!

Basemark:
LG Optimus G: 39.1
Note II: 43.27
Galaxy S III: 31.13
One X (Tegra 3): 19.2

Here the G is about 33% faster than the S III and about double the speed of the One X though the Note II edges out the G by a hair.

I took the train back tonight and ran some tests with the Optimus G for about 50 minutes. While running tests is hard on a battery I couldn't help noticing that the G's battery drained really quickly. Check out this screen shot.



The battery drain is a vertical line! Then again, maybe I just need to put some cycles on the G's battery.

I'm a little disappointed that the G with all it's cutting-edge hardware ships with Android 4.0 even though the Note II ships with 4.1.

Okay, that's all for now. Tomorrow I'll have some more impressions and pictures and I'll have a full review in a few days.