I first saw it in a magazine advert­ise­ment. I men­tion this because I think it’s the first time I have ever been intro­duced to a product via print media; sign of the times, I suppose.

The Optimus G leapt off the page at me for a couple of reas­ons, the first of which was its remark­ably clean design. Des­pite the per­sist­ent bad rap that LG receives for its phones, I’ve always been a huge fan of their indus­trial design — espe­cially within the past year or so.

Some time after first dis­cov­er­ing it, hav­ing done my research on the phone, I was presen­ted with a rare oppor­tun­ity thanks to my con­tract with Rogers com­ing to a close (after 3 years — oh, Canada). Using this excuse, I quickly found myself bring­ing home a gor­geous white box.

A week or so later, as I debate whether or not to keep the phone, I offer my impressions.

Hard­ware

From the white box, a black slab emerged. Like most smart­phones, the form factor of the LG Optimus G is noth­ing sur­pris­ing. But what I’ve come to real­ize, after play­ing with sev­eral dif­fer­ent devices, is that the sub­tleties of the slab design impact the ergo­nom­ics immensely in day-to-day use.

The Optimus places its power/wake but­ton on the side, which I wasn’t ini­tially a fan of com­ing from my faith­ful iPhone 4S, but of course it makes sense — it’s much more access­ible there with the phone’s lar­ger screen. On the oppos­ite side, a simple volume rocker com­pletes the min­imal phys­ical but­ton allot­ment for the phone.

While no fur­ther but­tons are strictly neces­sary, I miss hav­ing a ded­ic­ated cam­era but­ton. Spoiled by the Lumia, I’ve even come to crave its half-press func­tion­al­ity, which makes it easy to trans­fer famil­iar cam­era ergo­nom­ics to the smart­phones that are increas­ingly repla­cing them.

I adore the clean lines and min­im­al­istic design of the hard­ware, which is sur­pris­ingly light and feels excel­lent in the hand. Spe­cial men­tion must go to the screen, which is won­der­fully bright, bal­anced, and accur­ate. It may not have the highest PPI on the mar­ket (though 1280 x 768 on a 4.7″ screen is no slouch), but it’s a solid dis­play framed by a tiny bezel that embod­ies the upper limit of what I think is sens­ible for smart­phone screen size.

Hid­den in the bot­tom bezel are the three capa­cit­ive touch but­tons: Back, Home, and the Settings/Show Me All The Things but­ton. I appre­ci­ate how respons­ive these are, and once you put your favour­ite launcher on the phone you can cus­tom­ize how they behave. Except for the Back but­ton, which I con­tinue to think of as Android’s serendip­ity switch.

I’ll also briefly men­tion that bat­tery life has not been an issue for me. Using the phone as my daily driver has yiel­ded per­fectly accept­able endur­ance. In other words, it makes it through about a day and a half of nor­mal usage, drop­ping to a day for heav­ier work. Hav­ing the phone switch to a power-saving mode overnight is use­ful, as is activ­at­ing Eco Mode (more on that later).

Con­sid­er­ing the mon­strous spe­cific­a­tions of this phone (it bench­marks com­pet­it­ively with the Galaxy Note II and blows almost everything else on the mar­ket away), that’s very impressive.

Android

I men­tioned in my review of the Lumia 900 that I felt Android had finally reached a cer­tain matur­ity as of ver­sion 4.0 and, even more so, 4.1. I have been the happy owner of a Nexus 7 since it’s been avail­able here in Canada, and I love it to death. It was not the first Android device that I’d used, of course, but it was cer­tainly the first that I wanted to con­tinue using.

My thoughts on the Nexus 7 itself are com­ing in a review that’s taken me longer than expec­ted to pre­pare, but it puts me at a dis­ad­vant­age when assess­ing the Optimus G because the Nexus runs Google’s latest ver­sion of Android, the slick Jelly Bean, whereas LG has not yet updated the Optimus G from Ice Cream Sandwich.

In the­ory, this means I lose the advant­age of Pro­ject But­ter and the Holo UI refine­ments, among other things. In prac­tise, the LG is con­sist­ently smoother than the Nexus and I find LG’s skin to be unob­trus­ive, eleg­ant, and occa­sion­ally even bril­liant in its enhance­ments over stock Android.

This, I expect, is the point where the fandroids will dis­miss me, but hear me out because I was as sur­prised as you.

LG Exclus­ive Features

Set­ting aside for a moment the Jelly Bean defi­ciency, there is a lot to admire about LG’s skin. For starters, it doesn’t drastic­ally change the fun­da­mental aes­thetic of Android (and I’m not talk­ing just about visu­als). It feels like an Android exper­i­ence, and many basic things that you might oth­er­wise have had to work to achieve are built into the skin.

Quick set­tings toggles are wait­ing for you in the noti­fic­a­tion shade. You can cus­tom­ize which ones show up and in what order. There’s also a handy Clear but­ton in the shade that helps you dis­miss mul­tiple noti­fic­a­tions at once.

LG’s mar­ket­ing makes a big deal of two spe­cific fea­tures in the phone, both of which are sim­ilar to func­tion­al­ity found on the Sam­sung com­pet­it­ors. The first is Q-Slide. Mak­ing use of the 4 cores and 2GB of RAM, the Optimus G allows you to engage in a sort of live mul­ti­task­ing by super­im­pos­ing two apps using adjustable trans­par­ency. This can come in handy if you want to text someone while watch­ing YouTube…I guess. Per­son­ally, I’ve found no real-world use for it, but it does func­tion well in the tests I’ve done.

More use­ful is the Quick­Memo fea­ture. This is a stroke of genius. Activ­ated from the noti­fic­a­tion shade (or by press­ing volume up and down sim­ul­tan­eously), Quick­Memo allows you to doodle dir­ectly over­top of whatever is on your screen and then save the res­ult as an image. Altern­at­ively, you can choose a neut­ral paper back­ground, or toggle between the two freely.

Bey­ond the obvi­ous appeal of draw­ing mous­taches on friends, this turns the Optimus G into a bril­liant tool for quickly com­mu­nic­at­ing ideas — annot­at­ing a map view with dir­ec­tions, jot­ting down a phone num­ber without hav­ing to fiddle with the con­tacts app, annot­at­ing screen­shots for beta testing…these are all actual use cases I’ve found myself turn­ing to Quick­Memo for.

Besides the fea­tures men­tioned above, LG has also included a few other use­ful things like their own ver­sion of iOS’ Do Not Dis­turb, as well as Eco Mode. By dis­abling two of the four CPU cores, this toggle will help con­serve bat­tery life at the expense of some gam­ing per­form­ance. The dif­fer­ence is oth­er­wise imper­cept­ible and I have kept Eco Mode on for much of my basic usage of the phone.

One last LG item I want to men­tion is the typeface. LG Smart­Gothic is hands-down the most attract­ive, flex­ible, and read­able mobile phone font I have ever encountered. I wish it was avail­able sep­ar­ately to design with.

The Cam­era: Bet­ter Fea­tures Than Photos

I wanted to like this cam­era more. 8MP is a respect­able res­ol­u­tion. It should have been an easy check­mark on the pos­it­ives list. But…no.

The Optimus G actu­ally comes in two basic hard­ware vari­ants, one of which has a 13MP cam­era and a noti­fic­a­tion light in its power but­ton rather than on the face­plate. Accord­ing to reviews, des­pite the lower res­ol­u­tion, the 8MP cam­era is in fact the super­ior per­former. Since the Rogers vari­ant of the phone is the 8MP one, I find this con­clu­sion alarm­ing since the cam­era is quite weak in my estimation.

Pho­tos get soft very quickly, the cam­era struggles in low light, and you’ll need to do some mas­sa­ging to get great shots even in ideal con­di­tions. It’s not bad if you’re ok fid­dling with set­tings or have steady hands, but if your goal is to quickly snap an optimal shot you might be frus­trated. This is espe­cially true if you’re used to the almost magical cam­era pro­fi­ciency of the iPhone.

That being said, the actual fea­tures of the cam­era are ter­rific. Most cam­era con­trols are adjustable, four set­tings can even be selec­ted for quick access, and the addi­tion of a speak-to-shoot mode may seem gim­micky, but it’s not use­less: say­ing “cheese” to snap a shot ensures that you don’t shake the cam­era unne­ces­sar­ily by trig­ger­ing the shut­ter with your finger.

Phone Calls & Connectivity

I haven’t had the oppor­tun­ity to test out call­ing very extens­ively, except to con­firm that the audio qual­ity is basic­ally on par with the smart­phones I’ve used pre­vi­ously. On the other hand, I’ve had plenty of time to fiddle with data and connectivity.

After exper­i­en­cing LTE, it becomes dif­fi­cult to go back. I’ve never felt that 3G was slow, but hav­ing my phone be home-WiFi-fast wherever I go (within the city) is incred­ible. The Rogers vari­ant of the Optimus G uses the 2600 band for LTE, which is un-crowded and there­fore extremely fast. In fact, I doubt there’s a faster mobile ser­vice avail­able in Canada now. The trade-off being that this phone is not widely com­pat­ible with other net­works if you were to unlock it.

Unfor­tu­nately for me, cov­er­age is not par­tic­u­larly strong out­side of the down­town area either, so here at home I’ve had to “dis­able” LTE (I toggled net­work mode to prefer HSPA so it stops strug­gling to main­tain LTE connectivity).

Green Means…Something

While my opin­ion of the phone is largely pos­it­ive thus far, there are a few issues with it that have been imped­ing my enjoyment.

The first and most obvi­ous is the lack of Jelly Bean. At this point, enough has been writ­ten on the topic of why delayed Android updates for non-Nexus devices are frus­trat­ing. As of this writ­ing, LG has in fact made Jelly Bean avail­able in Korea on the Optimus G, but those of us over here are still wait­ing. And for someone com­ing from iOS, the fact that I have to wait at all is alien.

For me, this means that I’m miss­ing my favour­ite fea­ture in Android — the single most com­pel­ling thing about the entire oper­at­ing sys­tem for me: Google Now. More than Siri, I’ve found Now to be an incred­ible, sur­pris­ing, and utterly trans­form­at­ive way of inter­act­ing with my Nexus 7, and I des­per­ately want to have access to that func­tion­al­ity on a smartphone.

The most frus­trat­ing part is that the Optimus G is argu­ably a bet­ter phone than the Nexus 4: I prefer the form factor, and it has LTE. But the Nexus has Google Now, so the Optimus feels crippled. If I could order a Nexus 4 (or buy one without pay­ing a ridicu­lous premium for the used units) then I might be temp­ted to buy it simply for the advant­age of hav­ing an unlocked, stock Android exper­i­ence like I enjoy on the Nexus 7.

Besides Google Now, the second most coveted aspect of Android phones for me has always been the pres­ence of a noti­fic­a­tion light. Such a simple concept, sur­pris­ingly miss­ing from iPhones even now. Bewil­der­ingly enough, the noti­fic­a­tion light on the Optimus G is dif­fer­ent enough from the Nexus 4’s that it doesn’t work with Light­flow. This means that it fails to give me cus­tom­iz­able noti­fic­a­tions in dif­fer­ent col­ours for dif­fer­ent apps — all it can do is flash green. In other words, it’s totally use­less since I still need to turn on my screen to see what requires my attention.

Why did LG ima­gine that the only other noti­fic­a­tion col­our I needed would be the red light to tell me when it’s char­ging? The phone has a cable in its ass, what else would it be doing?!

Do I Keep It?

I have a week or so left with the device at this point. At the end of that period, I get to give it back if I don’t like it. Or I can keep it. With the under­stand­ing that it will soon receive Jelly Bean, the ques­tion becomes more chal­len­ging to answer.

I thought that CES would bring me many excit­ing new phones to look for­ward to, but it hasn’t pro­duced any­thing remark­able, so for now the Optimus G remains a flag­ship and an all-around impress­ive per­former. But is it impress­ive enough to spend years pay­ing off through a car­rier sub­sidy? Prob­ably not.

Then again, it’s undeni­ably a gor­geous phone that feels good to use and is as respons­ive as my iPhone, not to men­tion sev­eral times more power­ful in terms of raw specifications.

While I pon­der, I wel­come your thoughts: do you think the Optimus G is a keeper? Should I be run­ning away to a dif­fer­ent smart­phone ASAP? Have a favour­ite con­fig­ur­a­tion you’d like to share for the device? I’d love to hear about it!