One way network
The Windows Marketplace is still in its early stages, but LG has added a few apps of its own to make the Optimus 7 more appealing. The ‘Play to’ feature, for instance, allows you to connect to a DLNA-enabled home network and play music or video from the phone wirelessly to other networked devices.
I tried it with the Raumfeld system that I’ve been testing recently for Reg Hardware and it worked a treat, instantly finding the speakers and playing back music without any argument. There’s a slight delay – so it takes about five seconds either way to register your play and pause commands – but otherwise it was painless.
It’s a useful feature, but would be even better if you could use it to stream content from your network to the phone, like you can with Samsung’s AllShare on the Android-powered Galaxy S.
Sample Shots
Click for a full-resolution image
Click for a full-resolution image
The Optimus 7’s 5Mp camera offers autofocus, digital zoom and a not terribly good panorama feature, as well as anti-shake and ‘intelligent shot’ auto mode. There’s also 720p HD video which will record in 16:9 aspect ratio for that widescreen cinema feel. Picture quality isn’t bad overall, though it doesn’t particularly distinguish itself.
Also on board and hidden in the camera settings is ScanSearch, an augmented reality app that works in a similar way to Layar, where you use the camera to find an image of a street, GPS locates your position and info about surrounding businesses such as restaurants and pubs is overlaid on the screen. It works okay, though the info is still a bit limited – there’s more available on the Maps app.
Next page: Socially adept
COMMENTS
@Monty Burns
...not sure about that, but it's not like MS only wrote one set of drivers - OEMs can obviously still select the size of the screen, camera type & quality (e.g. the Mozart has a xenon flash at 8mp, whereas others have an LED flash and 5mp), amount of on-board memory (up to 32Gb is doable, apparently) presence of a physical keyboard (or not) etc. as well as non-driver related things like the style & quality of the phone's case.
AFAIK, Just about the only thing I think the OEMs don't choose (at the moment) is the processor, which has to be a Snapdragon (though it seems future releases will support a broader range of processors).
The real shame is that the OEMs didn't go all-out, though their lack of faith in WP7 at this stage is sorta understandable.
@AC
"Severly scarred by operator customisations"... I know what you mean, but have you actually used one? I have a WP7 on Orange (though it's a Mozart rather than an Optimus) and any Orange apps I don't like get booted off the "Start" screen in a jiffy (they'll stay in the list of apps in case I ever need them - it turns out the Orange Wednesdays app is actually kinda nifty). Similarly, you can change the Orange default colour scheme (though the Orange apps will remain their original colour).
... the bottom line is, WP7 was designed so that any network operator or OEM add-ons (e.g. the HTC hub) can be retained by the user if they're useful, but can't "force" themselves onto the user's Start screen if he doesn't want them there. Hence "scar" is probably the wrong word. "Creased" is mre like it.
Is this the same Apple...
... whose "fully rounded product" wasn't correctly designed for the human hand?
LG may have fallen short of perfection here, but at least when trying to design a wonderful, stylish phone they realised that the "phone" part was the most important.
Buttons
The buttons on this phone were the reason that I opted for the HTC trophy.
DLNA
Not sure DLNA is a particular selling point, as Android does DNLA - at least my HTC Desire does (Menu > Select Player in Music, and I can push straight to a Sonos device for example)
