Excellent voice quality. Dual-core speed. HDMI output.
Cons
Pixelated 3D images. So-so camera. HSPA 14.4 is not 4G.
Bottom Line
The AT&T LG Thrill 4G is a high-quality, dual-core Android phone that features a 3D camera and 3D gaming. But the 4G here isn't really 4G.
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.
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.
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
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.
LG applied its own skin to Android, and the results are mixed. This phone takes a long time to wake up its screen; whether you're hitting the power button to wake it from sleep or pulling it away from your head during a call, there's a noticeable beat before the screen wakes up. On the other hand, I love what LG did by creating folders in the app drawer, and you can create and customize your own groups of apps.
AT&T loads plenty of bloatware. There's the Kindle app, AT&T TV, a "lite" version of the Qik video chat app that only works over Wi-Fi, a QR code scanner, pay GPS app and more. You can uninstall some but not all of it, and you can also install apps from outside the Android Market, which you couldn't do with older AT&T phones. That's nice, especially because you need that option to install Gameloft's 3D games.
Otherwise: Android phone. You know the drill. It has 200,000 apps, a great Web browser, Microsoft Office document viewers, and support for all the popular email systems. Facebook and Twitter apps also come built in. I downloaded a bunch of apps, and they all worked fine.
I did run into one fairly major bug: After a few days, the phone would sometimes not respond to the Power button. Swapping the battery and rebooting the phone always worked to fix this problem, and it went away after a factory reset. I wouldn't mention it at all except for the problems that occurred with the LG G2x for T-Mobile ($149.99, 4.5 stars), where a number of phones turned out to have serious problems remaining on.
Multimedia
The Thrill 4G comes with 5.5GB of internal storage and an 8GB MicroSD card tucked into a slot under the back cover. Our 32GB SanDisk card also worked fine. The phone's still camera takes 5-megapixel 2D photos and 3-megapixel 3D shots. 2D photos were soft, with 900 lines of resolution (I typically hope for at least 1,000) and washed-out bright areas. The 1.2-second autofocus delay was also longer than I'd prefer. 3D photos had an even longer shutter delay, at 1.5 seconds, and looked dim on the screen. The video camera mode records at up to 1080p in 2D and 720p in 3D. In both modes, I got 30 frames per second indoors and out, with some visual glare in bright areas of the shot.
The music player is standard Android, and music sounds clear over wired or Bluetooth headphones. The phone handles most common audio formats, but not WMA. The video player handed MPEG4, H.264, XVID and DIVX videos up to 1080P resolution. Watching videos with a wireless Bluetooth headset I had a bit of a lip sync problem, though; there was no problem with a wired headset.
HDMI output is one of the Thrill 4G's major strengths. Plug in an HDMI cable, and the phone's UI is immediately mirrored. Anything you're doing on the phone appears on the TV, including gaming and streaming video; it's a pity there's no Netflix for this phone yet. 3D video, and 1080P HD 2D video, both played smoothly on a Samsung 3D HDTV.
Conclusions
AT&T offers a lot of imperfect Android phones. There's the Motorola Atrix 4G: so fast, so innovative, so buggy. The Samsung Infuse 4G ($199, 3.5 stars): nice and flat, but too big for many people to hold. The HTC Inspire 4G ($99, 4 stars): good all around, but not quite cutting edge. And then there's the unlocked Samsung Galaxy S II ($799, 4 stars): just what everyone wants, but it's insanely expensive.
Add to that list the LG Thrill 4G, also an all-around good phone; it's just that this one is a bit thick and heavy, and 3D isn't a gimmick for everyone. The Apple iPhone 4 ($199, 4.5 stars) remains the top mainstream choice on AT&T, with its high-res screen, tons of apps, and instantaneous camera response. If you like 3D or want to use your phone to pipe videos to HDMI-equipped TVs, though, the LG Thrill 4G will be one of the best choices for you.
By Sascha Segan
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