T-Mobile’s best Android phone, the T-Mobile G2x with Google ($199), gets things right by keeping them simple. While T-Mobile’s other flagship Android phones still have their advantages, The smooth, fast, and elegant G2x offers the best experience all around. An impressive 1GHz Nvidia dual-core processor, great specs, support for T-Mobile’s HSPA+ network, and all-around good looks. Running Android 2.2 at launch, but LG promises it will be upgradable to version 2.3 in the future and Android fans will appreciate the stock Android interface. Also notable is that the T-Mobile G2x is T-Mobile’s first “G-series” phone not made by HTC (unlike the T-Mobile G1 and T-Mobile G2). This underscores T-Mobile’s confidence in LG; we hope the G2x is the first of many excellent LG smartphones to make their marks on the U.S. market. Another one of those rather indistinguishable black slab phones, the 5-ounce G2x measures 4.9 by 2.5 by .4 inches (HWD). It feels solid in the hand, with a soft-touch plastic back panel with a pointless silver metal stripe running down its length. The front is dominated by a bright, sharp 4-inch, 800-by-400 screen. In an era of 960-by-540 displays, the screen resolution here isn’t tremendously high.
The 4-inch WVGA (800 x 480) IPS panel looks good on paper but misses the mark when compared to the competition. Sure, the colors are rich and the viewing angles are wide, but the LCD washes out more than expected in direct sunlight and suffers from a significant amount of backlight leaking out from the edges of the screen, resulting in visible “stains” on solid, dark-colored content. We’re also somewhat perplexed as to why LG decided against outfitting this dual-core smartphone with a qHD (960 x 540) display,
The handset connects to T-Mobile’s 2G and 3G networks, and to 3G networks overseas. T-Mobile calls this phone “4G,” but it’s a misnomer, as the G2x uses HSPA+ 14.4, a fast system, but one which T-Mobile’s own executives have said in other contexts isn’t 4G. Still, though, peaks of 5.6Mbps down and 1.5Mbps up are nothing to sneeze at, and feel very quick. The phone can also be used as a Wi-Fi hotspot, with the right service plan.
There’s one potential problem, though. While the G2x had roughly the same RF reception as the Samsung Galaxy S 4G, it occasionally dropped very sharply from 4G to 2G in my tests, something other reviewers have also noted. It’s yet to be seen if this is a network or device issue. Battery life is on par with most other smartphones of its kind, at 6 hours, 35 minutes of talk time and about a day’s worth of use.
Media playback is a big deal here, and the G2x is one of the best media phones ever. The phone’s killer feature, thanks to the Tegra 2 chipset, is HDMI mirroring. Everything you see on the phone’s screen, including copy-protected content and Internet streams, can be pumped out to an HDTV.
The experience starts out a bit awkward, with some clipping of the phone’s portrait-format menu screen on a landscape-shaped TV screen. But once you load up some landscape-formatted content (a movie, or streaming TV, or a game) it just looks gorgeous.
Videos play beautifully on the phone itself as well, in every unprotected format we had and at resolutions up to 1080p (although scaled down on the phone’s screen, of course.) Music, also in all the typical formats, sounds fine through wired or Bluetooth headsets. There’s 5.4GB of built-in memory to store your media, along with a MicroSD card slot under the back cover, which worked fine with our 32GB SanDisk card.
The G2x has an 8-megapixel camera with 1080p video recording. In practice, the video recording works much better at 720p resolution. I found 1080p videos to be a bit jerky when played back on my Macbook Pro, and one video was missing its first few seconds. The 720p videos I recorded, on the other hand, were flawless. And given that no other U.S. phone currently even attempts 1080p recording, I’ll give the G2x a pass for this.
T-Mobile G2x is the best full-touch-screen smartphone the carrier has to offer right now. It feels considerably faster and smoother than the Galaxy S 4G, as the slightly slower modem is balanced out by the beefier processor. It’s also speedier, and looks and feels more expensive than the MyTouch 4G. And the HTC Sensation won’t be out for months. So for now, the sleek and speedy G2x delivers the best Android experience you can find.
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