LG DoublePlay review

Almost everything about the phone's physical design, for one. It may look perfectly fine in the press pics, but the LG DoublePlay is an absolute brick in the hand, well over half-an-inch thick, and weighing nearly half a pound — heavier than even massive slabs like HTC's Evo 4G, Amaze 4G, Titan and Rezound, and even a touch more than the tank-like Droid 3 and HTC Arrive sliders. In recent memory, only the Kyocera Echo, with its twin 3.5-inch screens and hefty folding mechanism, could balance the scales evenly. Here's a handy comparison chart.

To add insult to injury, there doesn't seem to be any perceptible reason for the extra weight here. Unlike any of the devices I refer to above, the DoublePlay has a distinctly cheap feel. While it does have a solid sliding hinge with very little play and I like the gunmetal-gray and silver motif, it feels like a predominately plasticy device and it can creak when held. The phone's ergonomics are pretty terrible, too. Remember how I said the DoublePlay was a brick? It's also easy to drop, with smooth edges and a lack of grippy surfaces to keep it from slipping out of your hands.

Slide open the screen, and and it will be time to come to terms with the cramped, awkward layout of its smaller two-inch counterpart and a split-keyboard backlit by blue LEDs. Obviously some sacrifices had to be made to fit the miniature touchscreen, but the four-row keyboard not only ditches niceties like hardware search buttons for quick multitasking, but also any kind of spacing or staggering between its tiny keys. Their domed caps only served to make my thumbs press two keys at a time by falling into the valleys in-between. I did manage to bang out some email with the hardware keyboard, but I dreaded it every time, and I think this might be the first smartphone with a physical input mechanism where I preferred using Swype on the touchscreen.

Also, as we discussed earlier, you've got to keep a good grip on this phone to keep it from slipping out of your hands, but for whatever reason LG put the power button right along the curved surface you're likely to grip when typing. I often ended up accidentally shutting off the screen when trying to send out texts. There's nothing particularly wrong with the other minimalistic controls, though. The volume rocker has a firm, clicky actuation and a useful notch to tell up and down apart, and the typical four capactive buttons below the screen work well. The Micro USB port is covered by an unobtrusive pull-out shield, and the battery cover's easily removable if you want to swap cells out.

Speaking of those screens, one of them is reasonably good, but unfortunately it's not the big one. Despite the comparatively gigantic size of the DoublePlay in today's market, LG opted for a 3.5-inch HVGA (480 x 320) resolution screen here, and from the distance you'll typically be interacting with the phone, that 165ppi pixel density makes for grainy viewing. Given that free-on-contract smartphones often boast larger screens and 800 x 480 resolution, the $100 DoublePlay feels exceptionally dated in this department. The screen also exhibits some pesky ghosting when you scroll. Also, the screen washes out colors slightly and it loses brightness when viewed at off-angles, but we don't really expect you'll be sharing a messaging phone with a friend that often anyhow.

The way the screen handles sunlight is pretty interesting, though. There appears to be some sort of anti-glare filter beneath the glass that dissipates light to make the screen easier to read outdoors, though it simultaneously makes it look like your images are filled with tiny indigo dots.

By comparison, the tiny two-inch QVGA (320 x 240) secondary display is clear, bright and colorful, but it doesn't really matter because of how little you'll be using it.

Gaming

Similarly, while you shouldn't expect the DoublePlay to run all the latest games, it certainly runs quite a few. Angry Birds Rio and World of Goo worked quite nicely, as did Air Attack HD, and we were even able to play Minecraft Pocket Edition, although we saw some noticable slowdown there. (Shadowgun also runs, but it stutters like mad.) Mind you, none of these games looked very good on the DoublePlay's screen, and the device's terrible rear speaker also doesn't help matters there.

Reception and battery life

As long as we weren't using the aforementioned speakerphone, call quality was fine, about what we expect from T-Mobile in San Jose, California. Coverage can be spotty in certain parts of the city, and the DoublePlay didn't seem much better at picking up a signal there. We did have trouble getting a GPS fix on one occasion, but it might have been a fluke.

Battery life was actually surprisingly decent for a dual-screen device. With heavy use or as a 4G hotspot, we could drain the 1500mAh battery quickly, but we still got well over 24 hours with lighter loads. If you forget to plug it in at night, you can still spend part of the next day using the phone before it'll need to be recharged.

The camera on the LG DoublePlay actually isn't half bad. You'll definitely see a lot of grainy images indoors and after the sun goes down, but the five-megapixel sensor captures plenty of detail, colors were neither disturbingly vibrant nor unnaturally muted, and we generated some perfectly passable pictures when viewed at lower resolutions. Video quality isn't bad, either, and the 720p footage actually looks relatively high-definition, unlike the "HD" material we've gotten from some cheaper smartphone and tablet cameras in the past.