LG Optimus L9 (T-Mobile)

T-Mobile is home to some excellent smartphones, like the Samsung Galaxy S III?and the Samsung Galaxy Note II, but they'll both cost you upwards of $300. That may not be much over the span of a two-year contract, but it's still a lot to throw down all at once. Then there are free phones, like the T-Mobile myTouch?and myTouch Q, which are perfectly decent starter phones, but are somewhat lacking compared with the competition. Thankfully, T-Mobile is bridging the gap with the $79.99 LG Optimus L9, a solid midrange smartphone that costs less than $100. It has an attractive display, a snappy processor, and good call quality. It's an excellent choice if you want high-end features on a modest budget.

Design, Network, and Call Quality
The Optimus L9 looks attractive, if somewhat generic. It's a black rectangular slab with a rubbery, lightly textured back panel. There's a plastic silver ring around the middle, and a black plastic ring around the display. It measures 5.19 by 2.69 by 0.36 inches (HWD) and weighs just 4.41 ounces. It's large, but easier to handle than the Galaxy S III or the mammoth Galaxy Note II. The width of the phone is very comfortable, but I still can't quite hold it in one hand and swipe the Notifications bar down from the top of the screen. There's a Power button on the upper right corner, a Volume rocker on the left, a 3.5mm headphone jack at the top, and a charging port on the bottom.

The L9 has a 4.5-inch, 960-by-540-pixel IPS LCD display. It's sharp and bright, and text and images look great. The resolution isn't as high as it is on the GSIII, but it also lacks the GSIII's PenTile pixel layout, which can cause images to look fuzzy on that phone. Below the display are capacitive Back and Settings buttons, on either side of the ovular physical Home key. Typing on the onscreen keyboard felt fine.

T-Mobile doesn't have LTE like AT&T, Sprint, or Verizon, but the carrier's HSPA+ 42 network is a still-speedy alternative. Unfortunately, the Optimus L9 hooks into the carrier's HSPA+ 21 network, not 42, so data speeds aren't as fast. Still, I saw average speeds of 6Mbps down and just over 1Mbps up, which should be plenty fast for most users. You can also use the phone as a mobile hotspot with the appropriate plan from T-Mobile, and it connects to 802.11 a/b/g/n Wi-Fi on the 2.4GHz band.

The Optimus L9 is a good voice phone. Reception is solid, and calls sound good in the phone's earpiece?voices are a little robotic and there's a slight hiss in the background, but are otherwise clear and easy to hear. The speakerphone sounds somewhat abrasive but it's loud enough to use outdoors. Calls made with the phone are loud and clear, though the noise cancellation caused a faint humming sound in the background. It also supports T-Mobile's UMA-based Wi-Fi calling, which is a great fallback in areas with less-than-optimal T-Mobile coverage and a good way to save some money on your phone plan.

I had no trouble connecting to a?Jawbone Era?Bluetooth headset and calls sounded fine through it. But I wasn't able to trigger voice dialing, over Bluetooth or anywhere else for that matter. The phone's 2,150mAh battery was good for a solid 9 hours and 49 minutes of continuous talk time.

Processor and Apps
The phone is powered by a dual-core 1GHz TI OMAP 4430 processor. That's not a processor we see often, especially now that Texas Instruments is?moving away from smartphones. It's not quite as fast as the dual-core 1.5GHz Qualcomm chips in many high-end phones, but it beats the pants off of any single-core smartphone out there, of which there are still plenty. Navigating my way around the phone felt smooth, and you've definitely got enough power here to run any of the 600,000+ apps available in the Google Play store.

Android 4.0.4 (Ice Cream Sandwich) is the version of the OS on board, along with LG's Optimus UI 3.0 overlay. There's no word on whether the phone will receive an upgrade to Android 4.1 (Jelly Bean). Thankfully, the phone is snappy and responsive, and LG's customizations are attractive. You get five customizable home screens to swipe between that come preloaded with apps, folders, and widgets. Unfortunately, bloatware runs rampant. You get nine pieces of bloatware from T-Mobile alone, and you can't delete any of it. You can disable it from showing up in your Apps menu, but that's it.

One cool feature you get is QuickMemo, which is a system-wide note taking service that lets you annotate screenshots with handwritten notes and sketches, which you can then share. You also get SmartShare, which lets you display music, photos, and video on your HDTV or monitor via DLNA. There's also the usual Android bells and whistles, including a fast Web browser, excellent email support, and voice-enabled, turn-by-turn GPS directions via Google Maps.

Multimedia and Conclusions
The Optimus L9 has 1.69GB of free internal storage, along with an empty microSD card slot underneath the battery cover. My 32 and 64GB SanDisk cards worked fine. The phone was able to play all of our audio test files, and sound quality was excellent over both wired 3.5mm headphones as well as?Altec Lansing BackBeat?Bluetooth headphones. All of our test videos played back without a hitch, at resolutions up to 1080p, though audio was out of sync over Bluetooth.

The 5-megapixel camera is surprisingly good. Shutter speeds are fast, at just 0.2 second to capture a photo. Colors and detail look accurate and sharp, though photos can get noisy if you zoom in too far. You get LG's Cheese Shutter, which allows you to snap a photo by saying the word cheese, which is good for when you want to get yourself into the picture. There's also a standard 1.3-megapixel front-facing camera for self portraits and video chat.

The LG Optimus L9 isn't the biggest, baddest smartphone out there, but it plays an important role in T-Mobile's lineup. Sure, the Galaxy S III or the Galaxy Note II blow this phone out of the water?with bigger, higher-resolution displays, more powerful processors, and faster HSPA+ 42 data speed?but they also cost more than three times the price. For less than $100, the LG Optimus L9 gets you a great mix of features and performance. T-Mobile offers cheaper phones, like the myTouch series or the Samsung Exhibit II 4G?, but none of them can match the L9 on performance or quality. It still pays to check out what's on sale, but either way, the Optimus L9 is a bargain.

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