Gadgetory

well this is David with the verge and this is the LG Nitro HD that's the first AT&T phone to have a 720p display and it's only the third to connect to ATT's new LTE network joining the Samsung skyrocket and the HTC vivid the Nitro has a 1.5 gigahertz dual-core processor gig of ram 4 gigabytes of internal storage it's good looking it looks just like the Samsung Galaxy S 2 it's got the same textured back and the same kind of look and feel all over its plasticky but well made and looks pretty good most of the ports are up top there's the power button microUSB port and the headphone jack and they're all a little crowded up there plus the microUSB port is covered by the most ridiculously breakable piece of plastic I've ever seen you're better off probably just breaking it as soon as you get the phone and not dealing with it anymore there are three capacitive buttons down at the bottom instead of the usual four they've also been redesigned and the Menu button and search button were combined so that if you long press on the menu button it'll search for you instead LG actually customized pretty much everything about this phone and it almost never works out in LG's favor the phone's running Android 2.3.5 so you're not getting the latest version of Android anyway and it's just really heavily modified for mostly kind of pointless reasons it has icons in these weird kind of glossy containers it has a light blue and white color scheme that doesn't look very good and even the app drawer is designed in a way that makes it much more confusing there's three different layouts and one of them groups things funny and another puts them in the wrong order and it's just really hard to navigate the browser's fairly average verge into red phone it has some issues with image heavy sights but for the most part works fine as you did add a navigation bar to the bottom of the screen but it's not such a huge problem because you get so much real estate on the 720p display it's a four point five inch IPS display and it looks really really good it has really accurate colors and it's bright and you can't really see individual pixels like you can on some other big screen phones but the best thing about the Nitro HD has to be it's LTE performance we got our review unit right as a TTS LTE network went live in New York City and we had speeds as fast as 60 megabits per second down and 50 megabits per second Oh once the network is officially live it speeds won't be as fast but it's certainly much better than the HSPA+ that 18t has been trying to pass off as 4g until now the great display and LTE both bring the same downside and that's really bad battery life I never got a full day out of the Nitro HD and it was really more like a few hours as long as I was using it heavily if streaming video through Netflix in particular just destroys the battery otherwise it's a pretty average smartphone call quality is good but not great and speakerphone performance isn't very good because the speaker is quiet anyway and it's located right where you not really put your hand on the phone so it means it even more there are two cameras an 8 megapixel camera on the back and a 1 megapixel camera on the front and both are fine for what they're supposed to do but neither is particularly great it does shoot 1080p video from the rear camera which looks better than most smartphones but again nothing to write home about at $249 the LG nitro HD is the best phone you can currently buy to connect to a tMT's LTE network but lt's not everywhere yet and if you're outside the test markets you'll be better off with a phone like the iPhone or the samsung galaxy s 2 which offers better software better battery life and slightly better performance