Skip to Main Content

Hands On With the LG Optimus G

The LG Optimus G features a quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 Pro processor and third-generation LTE support; as you can guess, it's really fast.

September 19, 2012

LG and Qualcomm showed off the flagship LG Optimus G Android smartphone at a press event this morning, following .

The Optimus G is hugely important for LG, which needs to re-establish itself as a top-tier player in the Android space. LG and Qualcomm have a 16-year partnership, and together were the first to introduce a CDMA phone and a broadcast mobile TV phone, as executives at the event were quick to point out.

While we listened to the talk and played with devices, hotel staff served us "G mosas," which were apparently actual mimosas and a little bizarre for an 8am press event. (I didn't have one.)

Design
The first thing that hits you is that the LG Optimus G is a trim, finely cut device; as time goes on, bezels are getting thinner, and weight figures are dropping. The Optimus G measures 5.19 by 2.71 by 0.33 inches (HWD) and weighs 5.1 ounces. Even with a 4.7-inch 720p IPS display and oversized 2100mAh battery, the Optimus G feels surprisingly thin and light. It's still a big phone of course, but every tenth of an inch and tenth of an ounce helps.

Aside from the glass screen, which looked bright and vivid at least in the presentation room's lighting, the phone is made entirely of plastic, with a textured, diamond-like pattern on the back panel. It's no aluminum anodized or glass finish, but it's no worse than, say, the Samsung Galaxy S III.

The phones we saw each had an extendable mobile TV antenna. This meant we were still holding global devices and not specifically the ones that would come to the U.S., although LG assured us that the final devices would look and perform the same (minus the antenna).

Hardware, Apps, and Camera
The big news here is the Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 Pro processor and 2GB RAM. It's a quad-core Krait CPU running at 1.5GHz in this iteration, and it includes third-generation 4G LTE support, making it the first processor SKU to ship globally with this configuration. Despite only running Android 4.0 "Ice Cream Sandwich" instead of Android 4.1 "Jelly Bean," any lag I noticed on the LG Intuition was gone; the LG Optimus G felt smooth and very fast, whether I was swiping between menus or firing up applications.

As with the gargantuan , the Optimus G lets you take notes on screenshots of Web pages and email them to colleagues marked up. There's no stylus, but you can make basic markups with your fingertip. This is also a phone from which you could conceivably give a presentation. Instead of just projecting slides onto a mirrored display, you could see thumbnails of additional slides on the phone while presenting one to the audience on a large TV. You can also preview presentation notes on the phone without showing them to the audience.

The 13-megapixel camera looks to be another bright spot. The phone can snap five shots simultaneously and present you with a selection, letting you choose the one with your friend's eyes open instead of closed, and then delete the others. It also has the "Cheese Shutter," meaning you can set it to snap a photo just by saying "cheese," without having to fiddle with the phone to press the shutter button. I'm hoping it takes better pictures than the 8-megapixel LG Intuition, which was only mediocre in this regard and not up to Samsung or Apple standards.

Video Mirroring and Live Zoom
On the video side, thanks to the Snapdragon S4 Pro's pixel rendering capabilities, the Optimus G lets you zoom and out while playing a video and mirroring it to a large TV simultaneously. This way you could, say, show off a home video you recorded, and then highlight spots of the video for your friends and family by pinch-zooming in and moving the live playing video around.

At least during the demo we saw, it worked okay on a 720p copy of what appeared to be Journey 2: The Mysterious Island. Zooming in on Dwayne Johnson's massive cranium looked somewhat jerky, though. Still, it was impressive considering it's coming from a phone.

LG says you can also put up a video, say for your nephew to watch, and then answer an incoming text on the phone itself without disturbing the video playing on the TV. This is another neat trick, but it all depends on what kind of media you can browse, buy, and download onto the phone itself in the first place. Most people still aren't piping a lot of video from their phones onto their TVs. Still, by making this sort of thing possible from a technological standpoint, maybe consumer demand will follow.

The LG Optimus G will arrive sometime in Q4 2012; pricing and carrier info has yet to be released.

For more, read .

For more from Jamie, follow him on Twitter @jlendino.