The LG Thrill 4G ($99.99) is a pleasant surprise: a well-rounded dual-core Android phone which comes with a bunch of 3D games, a 3D camera, and the ability to pipe 3D out to big-screen TVs. It's not perfect, but if its unique strengths appeal to you, it's an entertaining phone.
Physical Features and Call Quality
The LG Thrill 4G is a slab-style phone that looks a heck of a lot like every other black slab on the market, until you turn it over and see the two lenses for the 3D camera. At 5.0 by 2.7 by .5 inches (HWD) and 5.9 ounces it doesn't sound very heavy on paper, but for some reason the phone felt very dense to me, especially when compared with the larger yet lighter Sprint Motorola Photon 4G ($199, 4.5 stars). The phone's HDMI and USB ports are right next to each other on the left side, covered by swinging plastic doors. I found the Power button on the top panel a bit mushy. The Thrill also has a 3D button where the camera button should be. Over and over again, I kept clicking the button thinking it would either activate the camera or shoot a picture while in the camera app, and instead it activated the 3D mode.
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I'm also not excited about the 4.3-inch, 800-by-480 screen. While it looks great indoors, with rich colors, it washes out too easily outdoors, sometimes showing fingerprints as much as the underlying image. The filter needed to turn the screen into a parallax-barrier 3D panel is at least partially at fault here.
Specifications
- Service Provider
- AT&T
- Operating System
- Android OS
- Screen Size
- 4.3 inches
- Screen Details
- 800-by-480 parallax barrier 3D TFT LCD capacitive touch screen
- Camera
- Yes
- Network
- GSM
- Bands
- 850, 900, 1800, 1900, 2100
- High-Speed Data
- GPRS, EDGE, UMTS, HSDPA
- Processor Speed
- 1 GHz
A very good voice phone, reception on AT&T's 3G network was unusually strong in my tests. Sound through the earpiece was loud, and a bit muddy but not too bad. The earpiece didn't distort at high volumes. There was no side tone. The speakerphone was extremely loud and clear, one of the loudest I've heard recently. Transmissions were also excellent, clear and loud. The phone paired easily with my Aliph Jawbone Era Bluetooth headset ($129, 4.5 stars) and triggered the accurate voice dialing. Talk time, at 8 hours 35 minutes, was solid.
There's one thing the Thrill isn't, though: 4G. You're getting HSPA 14.4 here, which is a 3G technology. Internet speeds were fast thanks to the dual-core processor and good signal strength: I got 3.5Mbps down and about 650Kbps up on several speed tests with the Ookla Speedtest.net app. The phone works as a tethered modem or Wi-Fi hotspot with the appropriate plan, and integrates 802.11 b/g/n Wi-Fi. Its GPS locked in quickly in midtown Manhattan in my tests.
3D Performance
AT&T didn't call this phone the "LG Thrill 3D," and that's probably wise. While 3D is a great gimmick for the Thrill 4G, and the phone handles it better in many ways than Sprint's competing HTC EVO 3D ($199, 3 stars), the Thrill's screen just isn't up to the task of a fully 3D life.
LG makes it easier to find and use 3D content than HTC does. Right at the bottom of the home screen, there's an icon marked "3D Space" which launches a carousel of 3D content: the 3D camera mode, the gallery, games, and YouTube.
3D apps appear in their own folder in the App Drawer. The phone comes with three full, 3D games, and they're great games: Asphalt 6, NOVA HD and Let's Golf 2. An AT&T movie store, run by mSpot, rents expensive movies for $4.49-4.99/day, including some 3D titles.
The Thrill is also much better than the EVO 3D at playing 3D files you've gotten from elsewhere. If you have a 3D video, you can tell the phone how to display it; the Thrill had no problem showing movies I ripped off a 3D Blu-Ray disc, even through its HDMI port on a 3DTV.
But the Thrill's screen just isn't ideal. With its lower 800-by-480 resolution as compared with the EVO 3D's 960-by-540, photos and videos looked noticeably grainy, and my eyes had a lot of trouble locking in 3D planes. Also, just like the EVO 3D, the Thrill doesn't have a 3D viewing angle. It has a viewing point, and if you don't hold the phone in exactly the right place, you get double vision.
Android and App Performance
The Thrill 4G runs Android 2.2.2 on a TI OMAP 4430 chipset, the same dual-core, 1GHz processor found in the Motorola Droid 3 ($199, 3 stars) for Verizon Wireless. According to our benchmarks, it's of comparable speed to the Droid 3 and Nvidia Tegra 2-powered phones like the Motorola Atrix 4G ($199, 4 stars) and Motorola Photon, and faster than the HTC EVO 3D, not to mention single-core phones like the Samsung Captivate.
Source:http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2390444,00.asp?kc=PCRSS05039TX1K0000762
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