LG Optimus 3D review: This summer, in 3D

Good connectivity with HDMI

The connectivity options that the LG Optimus 3D has to offer includes quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE for world-wide connectivity and tri-band 3G with 14.4Mbps/5.76Mbps for faster mobile Internet in areas with supported 3G bands.

The Optimus 3D has Wi-Fi b/g/n, Bluetooth 3.0 (no HS profile) with A2DP and a microUSB port for local data transfers. USB tethering and Wi-Fi hotspot options are available for sharing the phone's data connection. You can secure the Wi-Fi hotspot using WPA2 or leave it open.

For multimedia connectivity, you have two choices - wired (HDMI) and wireless (DLNA). Using the SmartShare app you can control a DLNA network – you can play media from other devices (e.g. NAS) on your phone or play something from the phone on another device (e.g. DLNA-enabled TV).

The SmartShare app

Custom web browser is good, has Flash

The Android browser is one of the best available on a mobile device – put it on a powerful hardware like the LG Optimus 3D has and it provides flawless experience. LG has also taken the time two tweak the UI a bit, but the underlying rendering engine is the same.

The browser now has a permanent row of shortcuts at the bottom with five buttons - forward and back, tabs, new tab and settings. It eats into the screen real estate but you have to remember that the Optimus 3D has a 4.3" screen, not just a 4" screen like the Optimus 2X.

Still, the Settings icon is rarely used and shouldn’t stay there permanently. The back key is not terribly useful too, considering there's a hardware button for that.

Browsing GSMArena.com on the Optimus 3D • page options

The menu key brings up some more options - like text selection and find on page, but there's also Read It Later integration.

The Optimus 3D supports double tap zoom and pinch zoom. There’s text reflow too – it adjusts the columns of text to fit the screen width. If you’ve zoomed in using pinch zoom, you need to double tap the screen to make the browser reflow the text.

Tabs are managed with an attractive card interface. The bookmark list shows a thumbnail of the bookmarked page and you also get a “most visited” list in addition to the history. Read it later also has a tab here.

Tab management • text selection • search on page • most visited

The whole browsing experience is excellent – there’s no lagging and the 4.3” WVGA screen offers plenty of room even for complex web pages. Text remains crisp regardless of the zoom level.

Text reflow in action

The Optimus 3D browser is Flash-enabled that means you can use the desktop YouTube and other video sharing sites and also play Flash games. Flash games ran smoothly, but videos were another matter - 720p lagged, which isn't acceptable on a dual-core 1GHz smartphone.

Desktop YouTube in the browser • Flash game in fullscreen, landscape mode

Speaking of YouTube, you can also use the YouTube 3D app. Just as it sounds, the app is exactly the same thing as the regular YouTube Android app, except that it directly hooks up to YouTube’s 3D channel that’s full of good and not so good 3D content.

The YouTube 3D app lets you access arguably the largest database of 3D movies online

Brilliant office document editor, good organizer

The LG Optimus 3D comes with the usual set of organizing apps and there’s a preloaded document viewer and editor (well sort of).

The app in question is Polaris Office and it’s one of the most feature-rich mobile editors we’ve seen. Starting with the basics, you can, of course, view documents – Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents and PDF files too.

Polaris Office viewer and editor

Editing offers almost a full set of options – text style, justification, paragraph formatting, bullets, even creating tables (that’s a first). If you’re editing an Excel file, you get a formula wizard, resize rows/columns, border style, merge cells and so on. Even creating a full PowerPoint presentation is possible.

You can do practically anything with the app – it’s better than the other mobile editors we’ve tested, even better than the Windows Phone 7 one (which actually had many editing limitations).

Editing Word and Excel documents in Polaris Office

The app doubles as a file manager and also integrates with Box.net.

The calendar has four different types of view - daily, weekly, monthly and agenda. Adding a new event is quick and easy, and you can also set an alarm to act as a reminder.

The calendar has the usual good functionality

The LG Optimus 3D features an alarm clock application, which allows a lot of alarms to be set, each with its own start time and repeat pattern.

You can easily set up multiple alarms • Stopwatch • Timer

The organizer package also includes a voice recorder, which might be pretty useful for making audio notes and a nicely touch-optimized calculator.

The calculator and the voice recorder