Once a market leader, always a market leader. That’s the motto Samsung has been following since the launch of Galaxy S, their first flagship device. Then came Galaxy S II, the killer device and now Galaxy S III, hot property every mobile enthusiast wants to own. Now in all this hot shot mobile business, other manufacturer’s are motivated to come up with something better, something creative. And LG is a prime example. With the launch of LG Optimus 4X HD, LG has stepped into competition with the latest Samsung kid, the Galaxy S III. Hard to believe? Yep, I didn’t think so either. But after using LG Optimus 4X HD for a dozen of days, my thoughts about it have totally changed.
Read on the complete review to know what made me say all of the above.
Look And Feel
LG Optimus 4X HD is LG’s flagship device and without any questions, such devices should sport a killer look, saucy design factor. LG Optimus 4X HD delivers all this and more without fail. Pick up the device for the first time, give it a 360 degree look and you won’t even notice a single button! The front panel has no buttons at all just 3 capacitive touch buttons.
However, on the side lines, like most of the devices, there’s a volume rocker on it’s left sideline and a power on/off/lock screen multi-functional button at the top. But these buttons have been so neatly blended with triangular design (refer image below) that it almost feels like a button-less device…!!!
Talking about triangular design, LG Optimus 4X HD has sideline with miniature triangular embeds which give it a fashionable edge. Not to forget the chrome lining encapsulating this triangular design. All in all, the blend of these two appeals to eyes. Despite of the device having the “usual” bar factor, the chrome lining sideline’s with wrapped up triangle embeds give it a feel good, attractive look.
On the back side, LG’s brand logo has been chrome embedded, as usual looking great. The back panel has a textured, kind of falling rain design. The material used confuses me in good sense. I have been using the device as a daily driver and i never had to clean the back panel for prevailing palm impression or scratches. The rubbery feel and textured design allow a good hold of the device.
Hardware Front
LG Optimus 4X HD comes loaded with solid hardware specs. And when I say “solid” (I know it’s a bit cheesy) I mean it. LG has really studied the market, put in a lot of thought and come up with Optimus 4X HD. The devices has a True HD-IPS LCD capacitive touchscreen with 720 x 1280 pixels, 4.7″ inches (~312 ppi pixel density) corning gorilla glass screen, all these make up for a great viewing experience especially the bumped up pixel density giving a sharp, crisp screen.
In terms of processing power, Optimus 4X HD has Nvidia Tegra 3 chipset, ULP GeForce GPU and Quad-core 1.5 GHz Cortex-A9 CPU. The point to be noted here is that LG Optimus 4X HD is essentially a penta-core device i.e it sports 5 core’s with the 5th core acting as a low power consuming core for instances where device isn’t performing any processor hungry tasks. The device intelligently switches to the 5th core thus saving precious battery. Brilliant thinking from LG 🙂
On storage front, LG Optimus 4X HD isn’t crippled with low memory unlike LG’s previous devices. It comes with more than enough 16 GB internal storage with ability to extend that by up-to 32 GB. And has 1 GB RAM which could have been 2 GB considering the powerful processing abilities of the device but 1 GB isn’t bad figure at all!
People say, you buy a smartphone, you buy a camera as well. Just a word on Optimus 4X HD’s camera capabilities for those camera enthu’s. It comes with a 8 MP (okay in terms of flagship device standards), LED flash, auto focus, HD video shooting (1080p @ 30 fps). Everything camera wise works great except that fact that the camera lose’s focus way too soon. It’s a software issue and should get a fix soon from LG.
Performance
Good looks, check.
Excellent hardware, check.
All this complements well with good performance of the device software wise. LG Optimus 4X HD doesn’t disappoint in this department. I have always hated the UI front of LG in all the previous devices I took up for review. The grumpy user interface LG provides always irked me. But not this time, Optimus 4X HD comes with the latest Optimus UI v3.0. We talked a lot about this during it’s MWC launch and now got a chance to finally take it for a drive.
I must say, LG has done a great job with Optimus UI v3.0, it retains a lot of functionality from Ice Cream Sandwich and thus gives a near ICS user experience. The best part is LG hasn’t bloated the UI with it’s own screwed up customization’s as do other manufacturers (read Samsung). It has kept it close to ICS which works very well indeed. And the small customization’s it has done gel up well with usability of the smartphone. Lockscreen implementation, Remote connect, QuickMemo (really useful) being some great additions from LG’s part.
Coming to the daily device use, I rely heavily on my phone for checking emails, facebook, twitter, google reader, gtalk, yahoo messenger, whatsapp, viber, hike, evernote, etc etc etc. The list is long and my point is, there’s a lot of background, resource hungry apps running in background. Apart from a single phone restart when gtalk crashed, never have I experienced a slight lag in app switching, opening, video playback. Every thing has worked butter smooth, quad core processor served very well. Unfortunately I didn’t really get a chance to see how the 5th core switching worked since that required me to install a root requiring app and I didn’t want to play with it just yet 😉
Summing Up
Available for an extremely competitive price tag of approximately Rs. 33,000 (in India), LG Optimus 4X HD is a total steal! It gives head to head competition to Galaxy S III, has better hardware than Galaxy S III in some aspects and comes cheaper than it. If I were to choose between the prevailing flagship devices HTC One X, Samsung Galaxy S III, LG Optimus 4X HD, I’d without fail pick Optimus 4X HD. It’s a good buy in my humble opinion. You certainly won’t be disappointed.
Moreover, with Jelly Bean slowly making it’s way into android phone’s, Optimus 4X HD will be a dream device to use.
