T-Mobile G2x Review: Gingerbread-Infused

T-Mobile G2x - The Camera

The G2x’s Froyo ROM had LG’s standard camera app from the O2X and Revolution, but the G2x got bumped back to the stock Android camera app after the Gingerbread update. Maybe they consciously decided to make it as stock as possible (or maybe they just messed up), but for whatever reason, the camera app was changed in the Gingerbread update. The LG camera app is quite good, as we’ve noted previously, but there’s one major annoyance I have with it - after every picture, it asks what you want to do next. If you’re just shooting randomly, it becomes a serious pain. 

The default Android camera app is ugly, but the big problem here is that you lose many of the options present in the LG camera app, including the one to switch from the rear camera to the front facing 1.3MP shooter. Seriously. Remind me again, did I use the phrase “a bit half-baked” to describe the G2x software? This is a problem that definitely needs to be fixed, and soon. The 8.0MP pictures shot with the stock camera app are compressed much higher, with images that end up at roughly 35% of the size of the ones taken with the LG camera app. Also, you can’t shoot video at more than 720p with the stock camera app. In a phone that’s advertised with 1080p video capability (and had it until the update), that’s just unacceptable. I’ve seen some posts on T-Mobile’s forum indicating that some people are using Camera Zoom FX to get the settings and 1080p video recording back, but CZFX can’t switch to the front facing camera and it also costs $4.79. I don’t want to have to pay just to use the camera that worked really quite well until last week. 

So let’s talk about the camera’s abilities, as measured before the update and subsequent crippling of the camera’s abilities from a software standpoint.  As with the Optimus 2X, we were pretty happy with the high framerate of the preview image, it’s definitely one of the more fluid that we’ve come across recently. The pictures themselves are solid, but not particularly exemplary. The window on the battery cover for the camera, I suspect, has a lot to do with this. The test images look soft and yellowed out, for some reason, they’re significantly worse than the images we saw out of the Optimus 2X. I don’t know whether this is isolated to the specific phone I have for testing, because there doesn’t seem to be any significant camera hardware or software differences between the G2x and the O2X. Or maybe it was just a bad set of conditions for the G2x’s camera. In day to day use, the camera is pretty decent, with vibrant and sharp pictures. 

The other thing you need to be careful about with the G2x camera is that the window picks up dirt very, very quickly. This can significantly impact photo quality, so it’s important to clean it out every so often if you want decent pictures. 

The front facing 1.3MP camera is fairly medicore. There’s a lot of noise in the images, as well as a lack of colour saturation. The front facing camera also mirrors the image horizontally. It’s acceptable for video chat and fixing your hair in the elevator, but nothing more.

The G2x is capable of 1080p video (camera application notwithstanding), but it’s not that great. The video comes out soft, and at 1080p, lacks a lot of detail, especially compared to the latest HTC devices and the Droid 3. It’s not a bad video camera, especially for YouTube and Facebook uploading. But the optical hardware and encoder are definitely holding the G2x camera back.