Hands-On With LG?s Eye-Crossing 3D Optimus Pad

BARCELONA ? Tablets are what we wanted to see at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, and tablets are what we?ve got. They all have their gimmicks, and LG?s Optimus Pad has 3-D. It also has a new screen size of 8.9 inches.

First, the 3-D. The Optimus has a pair of cameras in the back for shooting stereoscopic 1080p video. This footage can be played back later on a big TV (the Optimus has an HDMI-out port) or piped direct to a big screen as you shoot (as you see in the picture above). I jammed a pair of 3D glasses over my regular glasses, held the camera in my other hand and tried to snap a picture whilst balancing on my crutches. Despite these various handicaps, the picture is a pretty good representation of the headache-inducing footage you?ll see without the 3-D specs.

Put the glasses on and things don?t get much better. The 3-D effect is there, but it has none of the slick smoothness you?ll see from a properly-shot clip. There?s no way you?ll ever mistake the footage for anything but cellphone video, even though both cameras are 5MP.

And if you want to view your 3-D video on the screen, good luck. LG touts the Optimus Pad as able to display 3-D, but see it you?ll need to travel back to 1955. The ?3-D? image is displayed as red and blue anaglyph, the kind which you need colored glasses to look at. Given that any color screen, ever, can do this, LG is pushing the truth a little here.

The rest of the Optimus Pad is sweet enough, with dual-core Tegra 2 chip, 32GB storage, 3G radio, 2MP front-facing camera (even worse than the other two) and Android 3.0 Honeycomb. The 8.9-inch size is actually pretty good, although all the cameras seemingly bring the weight up to an iPad-like 630-grams. Take a closer look and you?ll see LG has opted to make the screen long and thin. That?s great for wide-screen movies, terrible for everything else (except, surprisingly, two-pane horizontal e-book reading). Finally, the 1280 x 768 pixel screen sounds good, but in practice it isn?t so great. Samsung?s Tab displays are way nicer.

My prediction for the Optimus Pad? Lots of (digital) ink spilled by hacks like me during the MWC this week, followed by terrible sales and a quiet death. You heard it here first, folks!

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