The LG Optimus L3 E400 is an Android device first released on February 2012. Even back when it was released, it was a fairly low-end device.

It is equipped with a very weak Snapdragon processor clocked at 800 Mhz and comes with 384 Mb of RAM. It is preloaded with Android Gingerbread 2.3.6 and was mostly stock Android.

The device itself

It has a removable battery, as well as a micro-sd slot, which is also great. It also has a very poor camera that is especially bad in low-light situations.

In any case, the picture has a lot of noise. It also has 3 backlight buttons that acts as the back, home and menu button.

They work OK, i guess.

Firmware

While it was a decent phone at the time, it has aged poorly… at least on the stock firmware. The stock firmware is very slow and memory hungry, even though it’s on Gingerbread.

However… The XDA community eventually released an Ice Cream Sandwitch custom ROM for it. The one i’m using is MiniCM9 and installing the recovery was fairly straightforward thanks to the ROM Manager that you can find on the Google Play.

I would definitively recommend flashing a Custom ROM as it changes everything : You have more up-to-date software, you can overclock the processor and it still manages to run faster than the bundled ROM !

After you installed your custom ROM, I would recommend to install mLauncher, disable Google services, enable 16bit transparency and disable transition animations.

It should result in a much smoother device than the stock firmware ever was. (I still insist the stock firmware was really bad)

Games

I wish I could benchmark it but Antutu requires at least a Jelly Bean device so we’re out of luck here… So instead, I had tested a bunch of apps and games.

I first tried Super Dangerous Dungeons, an Adobe AIR game if i’m correct. The game runs mostly smoothly on it, with some infrequent frameskipping.

Due to the game running at a higher internal resolution, the game had to be resized to the lower resolution. This makes the game look somewhat bad unfortunely.

Then I tried Shattered Pixel Dungeon on it and it works just fine on it. Like Super Dangerous Dungeons, the game has to be resized to the lower screen resolution.

It still looks great though despite this.

Another game I tried was Reaper.

That game actually looks pretty good on this device but it has some touch issues on this device. To jump, you have to tap at the top right corner, in a certain spot. (really strange)

Other than that, it works smoothly.

On the other hand, a lot of recent games do not work on this device and flat-out crash. Minetest, Sonic Dash 2… not to mention you can’t install some of the bigger games unless you put a micro-sd card in there.

Thankfully though, the processor is an Armv7 processor.

As a result, it is a lot more compatible with modern apps than some other old devices on Armv6, like the Xperia X8. (See my Xperia X8 review)

Multimedia

Now let’s talk about video playback on this device. It is as you would expect it would be : it can only play 480p videos.

Not even MX Player could play 720p videos smoothly. And unlike VLC, MX Player does not have frameskipping options, which might have helped on older devices.

480p videos are running smoothly but I haven’t tried Youtube but my guess is that it would only be able to play 240p videos or at best, 360p videos. Not that it’s a huge loss anyway due to the low screen resolution.

Firefox also works on it but it’s not exactly fast…If you intend to browse with it, I would recommend you to install AdAway, as Ads can be quite demanding on such a low-end device.

Conclusion

The LG Optimus L3 E400 is fairly low-end device that should cover most of your basic needs, including some apps but you should pick up a better device than this one…

If possible that is.