While LG has fleshed out its mid-market smartphone offering in the form of the LG Optimus L7, we were wondering when the Korean firm would introduce their top of the line Optimus 4X HD to the Philippines. It seems that the Korean firm would be introducing the device sooner rather than later, as evidenced by a demo unit popping up in our office today. Let’s take a closer look at it, shall we?
It seems that everyone’s upgrading the size of their top-of-line devices, and LG is no exception. The LG Optimus 4X HD uses a 4.7-inch True HD-IPS LCD capacitive touchscreen that boasts a resolution of 720 x 1280 pixels, and is protected by Gorilla Glass. The overall look and feel of the device closely mirrors that of the L-series of devices, which isn’t a bad thing – the LG Optimus L7 was nice to look at, if a bit boring.
On the bottom lies three touch-sensitive buttons.
The overall construction of the device is pretty good, and the back of the 4X HD is textured, which actually improves grip. For some reason the overall design of the device makes it look smaller than it actually is. The overall dimension of 4X HD is 132.4×68.1×8.9 mm.
Imaging-wise, the Optimus 4X HD uses an 8-megapixel camera with LED flash. We haven’t had the chance to completely explore the camera yet, aside from the requisite test shots in our office. At this point it time we can conclude that the Optimus 4X HD is a pretty decent shooter, with very minimal shutter lag. We did see a pretty cool feature in the form of the Time Catch shot mode. Basically, the mode starts taking shots even before you press the shutter, and presents these shots to you right after you shoot. If you end up missing the right moment, you can review the rest of the pre-cached shots in the memory of the device and use those instead. Storage-wise, you’re looking at 16GB of internal memory, which can be expanded via the microSD slot.
Prying the back of the device reveals a large, 2150 mAh battery – which is a step up from the usual 1700 mAh batteries that we see in previous generation devices.
Hardware-wise, you’re looking at a NVIDIA Tegra 3 quad-core processor chugging along at 1.5GHz, which incidentally is the same processor powering its smartphone rival, the HTC One X. As a result, the device is pretty responsive, without much of the hangups that we saw in their other, underpowered unit, the L7. The L7 and the 4X HD both share LG’s UI overlay dubbed Optimus 3.0, but the difference here is that the 4X HD has enough horsepower under the hood to actually power the experience. We’ve run two of our basic benchmarks on the device, which you can see below.
As you can see, the 4X HD surpasses the Asus Transformer Prime in terms of performance by a large margin using AnTuTu which is odd, since both devices are powered by the same chip.
Using Qudrant, it’s a different story – the 4X HD is beaten by the HTC One X – which is again a bit odd, since both devices use the same processor. As always, synthetic benchmarks is a good gauge of what a device can do but it’s not the only gauge of performance. In fact, actual use is a better gauge of a particular device’s performance, something that we’ll be looking closely at as we review the device in the days ahead.
That’s it for now, we’ll be posting a review of this particular device as soon as we finish with it. Stay tuned.