The LG Optimus G announced on Tuesday is a beast of a smartphone. LG (06657011) held a press event on Wednesday in New York City to show off its latest quad-core smartphone and we were on hand to check it out. How does LG’s new 4.7-inch, Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich-powered smartphone with a monster 13-megapixel camera and 2,100 mAh battery feel? Read on to find out.
My immediate impression of the Optimus G is that it’s fast. It’s really, really fast. Thanks to a quad-core 1.5GHz Snapdragon processor by Qualcomm paired with 2GB of RAM, the Optimus G flies. I detected no noticeable lag when opening apps and flipping between home screens as is often the case when stock Android is skinned. The only real slow-down I observed was when I was trying to zoom in on video playback (a feature LG touted). There’s a minor delay when pinching and zooming, but it’s not a deal breaker by any means.
The 4.7-inch True HD IPS+ display, with its sharp 1280 x 768-pixel resolution, is both bright and vibrant. The phone not particularly heavy, but it feels like a handset that won’t easily slip out of the hand despite its large battery and glossy finish. Unfortunately, the device is skinned with LG’s Optimus user interface and isn’t running the latest version of Android.
The 13-megapixel camera is fast to boot up and shoot, and it includes features like the “Cheese shutter” that lets you use voice activation to take photos. The Cheese shutter is a feature we saw on the LG Intuition and it looks like it’s here to stay. Despite the high megapixel count, pictures taken with the Optimus G’s camera seemed grainy and couldn’t compare to other high-end phones like the One X and Lumia 920.
So the question now is: When can you get the Optimus G? LG says the smartphone will launch in the fourth quarter this year in the U.S.
Photos by Dan Graziano.