LG announced their 2012 flagship device, the Optimus 4X HD, in February at Mobile World Congress. It’s been three months and it still hasn’t hit the market. That’s soon going to change though according to the company, who just announced that the UK, Germany, Sweden, Italy, and Poland will get the new Optimus in June. Prices weren’t discussed, but we wouldn’t be surprised if this phone ended up being roughly 600 Euros. Whereas HTC announced their new devices in February and then shipped them in May, and Samsung announced the Galaxy S III two weeks ago and is planning on shipping it two weeks from now, LG felt that having a four month gap between announcement and availability was the best way to go. But enough about the logistical issues, what makes the Optimus 4X HD special?
Inside there’s a quad core NVIDIA Tegra 3 processor, the same one used by the One X. The screen measures 4.7 inches diagonal and does 720p, which again, is just like the One X. The battery is a bit bigger, 2150 mAh versus 1800 mAh on the One X. And as for the camera, it’s an 8 megapixel shooter, just like the One X, though it doesn’t have all the whiz bang features that the One X has thanks to its dedicated image processing chip.
Should you just go and buy a One X? That’s a tough question to answer. The Galaxy S III will be out in less than a fortnight and it will no doubt be the most successful Android smartphone of 2012, but in this writer’s opinion the best Android phone you can currently buy is actually the six month old Samsung Galaxy Nexus. It’s just $399 in the US, it has a pentaband radio so it supports both AT&T and T-Mobile, it runs stock Android, and while it may not have the best camera in the world … it’s a Nexus!