Gadgetory

with competition that includes Samsung's Galaxy s3 and HTC's One X LG is fighting an uphill battle in fact they all but snuck into the high-end smartphone market with the lg optimus 4x HD its specs are quite impressive but how does it stack up in real world tests can this quad core HD smartphone give Samsung and HTC a run for their money let's find out the LG 4x is a powerhouse by every definition of the term in case it wasn't clear enough the 4x means it's got a quad-core cpu in it the HD means it's got an HD display and as well as an HD camera the CPU is an NVIDIA Tegra 3 cortex a9 clocked at 1.5 gigahertz with ulp geforce video powering a 4.7 inch type true HD IPS LCD capacitive touchscreen with 16 million colors it's 720 x 1280 pixels which gives it a pixel density of about 312 PPI and all of that is tucked neatly behind a flat sheet of super strong corning gorilla glass unlike Samsung that puts the antenna for their NFC chip in the battery LG put their antenna in the back cover and they threw in a couple NFC tags for you to get started playing around with some of the cool things that you can do with NFC the battery is lithium ion with 2150 milliamp hours of power which in our test was plenty enough to get you through an entire day with normal use if you want to use this phone in the USA AT&T is your provider of choice it'll work on tmobile but until they roll out more coverage you'll be stuck with edge speeds voice however works equally great on either provider so aspects are great but how does all that hardware stack up on the front of the screen you've got what you'd expect your sensors your speaker front-facing camera very very modest branding and a plentiful screen down at the bottom you have capacitive buttons this is one thing we don't particularly like but you can go in and tweak how long the backlighting stays behind the buttons at the top of the phone you have your noise-cancelling microphone your 3.5 millimeter headset and headphone jack and in HTC style your power button over on the right you have absolutely nothing on the bottom you've got your MHL and microUSB port all nice and tuck together as well as your main microphone on the left you have a very basic up and down button very smoothly integrated together flipping the phone over on the back you've got your 8 megapixel camera with LED flash again some subtle branding and then your main speaker as well the back is also very well textured so it feels really good in hand something to look at while we're here is this double chrome ridge that wraps the entire phone doing this kind of gives the impression that you have a slide out keyboard you don't but why would they include it it actually helps significantly when you're holding on to the phone which is something that you need because the phone is so lightweight so how does the software in the user interface stack up although the 4x HD comes with Android Ice Cream Sandwich four point zero point three the user interface is LG's own Optimus UI version 3.0 which looks very similar to Samsung's TouchWiz UI and is much more colorful than stock Ice Cream Sandwich the Optimus UI three point 0 comes with some of the stock widgets that you've seen in previous versions of the UI the Yahoo weather widget is the same boxy one without many refinements although it is animated and it is somewhat pretty looking it is resizable as with most of the other widgets that come with it as well the launcher itself is quite nice coming preloaded with a lot of the apps and widgets that you're likely going to use already in place where you're going to use them and make the best use of them launching the app drawer is relatively quick and has a universal rap so no matter which way you scroll you're going to always be able to scroll and scroll and scroll you'll notice one thing that's missing you don't have a shortcut to the Play Store right up here in the top like you do with the stock Ice Cream Sandwich launcher you do however have this interesting little sprocket icon which essentially lets you go in and remove elements out of your app drawer essentially just so you can organize hit the check mark when you're done to accept it one thing that the LG has that most other phones don't is a voice recorder why phones don't include this is just beyond me it's very simple it's very basic it does what you needed to do it's right there and it's elegant I mean just look at this video playback is where the HD in the optimus 4x HD comes from without of the Box support for divx and xvid and MKV video files with resolutions up to 1080p the results are nothing short of astounding as long as your video source supports the higher resolutions you're golden video playback is what the optimus 4x HD was designed for and it does it very very well so with four cores and an HD screen can you possibly have good battery life in this phone 2150 milliamp hours isn't a huge battery but it's better than many we might even go as far to say better than most the battery is big enough to get you through your day without worries I was able to get almost to light use days out of one charge which really surprised me it's worth noting that LG is using a new SI o + battery technology rather than the standard lithium-ion technology that we've seen in most other phones now it's still a lithium-ion technology but the SI l + tech allows for more lithium ions to be crammed into a smaller space resulting in a smaller battery or longer battery life however you want to look at it how about the camera how does that stack up the rear facing camera is an 8 a pixel shooter with autofocus and LED flash still shots were fair the little bit saturated and with a bit more lens flare than we've come to accept in most phones the video recording capability of the Optimus comes set at 720p though it's capable of 1080p we ran it through our regular test in the front yard paying attention to close-ups detail and color contrast what we saw wasn't great the auto focus on the camera is hyperactive causing blurring every few seconds as the camera tries to refocus over and over comments on the YouTube video were brutal with many thinking this was caused by a dirty lens rest assured we clean the lens very well before shooting let's go through the pros and cons pros the phones got an above-average battery life especially considering that they didn't add any extra bulk it's got a removable battery something that we're seeing a lot of phones especially the high-end phones not have it's very slim very lightweight maybe too lightweight it's got bluetooth for that's different than a lot of other devices it already comes with Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich so there's no waiting for someone like Samsung or a carrier to build and approve android 4.0 you get it right out of the box you can expand your storage with microSD all the way up to an additional 32 gig how about some cons auto focus on the video camera is out of control this might be a deal-breaker for a lot of you the phone is almost too lightweight everybody that I gave it to thought that it was cheaper or not quite as high end as it really is and of course if you're in the US and you've got t-mobile you've got to live with slower edge speeds so overall what did we think of the lg optimus 4x HD as far as hardware goes it gets a nine it's hard to get a 9 in my book user experience suffered a little bit we rated it a seven a lot of that was because of well honestly the camera as far as software goes we a solid eight the Optimus UI version three isn't quite as clean as stock Android but it's probably the closest thing we've ever seen adding all those together we give the optimus 4x HD a solid eight well done LG you