Tip Us!

All input fields are optional, fill out as much or as little as you'd like.

LG Optimus G beast is now official, to hit Korea in September

by on August 28, 2012 5:10 am
3
views1885
41
0
0

Apple’s legal wins in the States might not be Samsung’s only worry right now, as the South Koreans may also soon lose their Android smartphone supremacy. At least in the high-end niche, where LG is about to launch a quad-core “beast” far snappier than Sammy’s Galaxy S3.

The Optimus G hasn’t been a mystery for quite some time now, with Qualcomm basically confirming rumors of the handheld’s coming last week. We saw the Optimus G’s spec sheet, we had a good idea of how the super-phone will look, so it was about time LG made it official.

As usual, the announcement was made via a Korean press release, although a more “sumptuous” unveiling is still expected to happen at the IFA 2012 in Berlin. There aren’t that many surprises in the press release, but we are very happy to notice that the Optimus G’s final design looks quite far off those leaked pictures from a few days ago.

The Optimus G won’t exactly come with “sexy” curves or any design breakthroughs, but sometimes simplicity can bring excellence. That said, the first official pics are exquisite, as far as I’m concerned, showing off a clean industrial-looking phone with personality, charm and elegance.

It’s a pretty manly handheld, although it will weigh just 145 grams and measure 8.45mm in thickness. The vertical and horizontal bezels are almost invisible, which is mostly due to LG using “fully integrated touch technology”, also helping reduce the air gap between the display and the surface.

The “True HD” IPS LCD display could be one-of-a-kind, with a 4.7-inch diagonal and a 1280 x 768 pixels resolution. In terms of hardware, there isn’t much we can say other than to urge you to prepare to see benchmarks massacred.

As Qualcomm themselves confirmed last week, the Optimus G will be powered by a quad-core 1.5GHz Snapdragon S4 Pro APQ8064 CPU, coupled with a stunning new Adreno 320 GPU and 2GB of RAM. There’s only one other phone confirmed as being equipped with the S4 Pro proc, but Xiaomi’s Mi2 doesn’t yet have an ETA for Europe or the States.

The Optimus G will be coming with a 2,100mAh battery, dual 13MP / 1.3MP cameras, Android 4.0 ICS out of the box, Bluetooth 4.0, NFC, DLNA, Wi-Fi and 4G LTE speeds. These are all pretty great specs, but there are two details that might raise some concern.

On one hand, there’s the lack of Jelly Bean on board this “beast”, which might not be extremely disappointing if an upgrade were to come soon after Optimus G’s release. However, we know LG’s track record with ICS updates, so our fear is that this big guy will not be treated with JB goodness by the end of the year. The battery is another huge concern, as Qualcomm seemed to be hinting at the using of a separate chip for LTE aside from the quad-core S4 Pro, a combination that might drain a lot more “juice” than usual.

All concerns aside, the LG Optimus G still looks a game changer to us, which is why it was great to hear that it will hit Korea as soon as next month with Japan following soon after and a worldwide launch scheduled “by the end of the year.” And no, we don't think European and U.S. tech enthusiasts will have to wait until November or December, as we highly suspect the Optimus G to be exactly the same as the Eclipse spotted getting FCC approval not long ago.

 

WRITER

Facebook Google+ E-mail

Adrian has an insatiable passion for writing ever since he was in school and found himself writing philosophical essays about the meaning of life and the differences between light and dark beer. Later, he found out that this is pretty much his only marketable skill, so he first created a personal blog and then discovered his true calling, which is writing about technology and gadgets in general and Android in particular.

YOU MIGHT LIKE

LG Logo aa 600px
Comments
  • MasterMuffin

    LG got more than HTC? Wow HTC ia doing bad! O.o

    • alex

      Reviewers trying to save them.. All media bias.. In the real world HTC is doing nothing..

      • OMGgary

        Yes, I’ve noticed the way that tech websites have been trying to hype up HTC. Too much damage done by the company to its own image at this stage, something which isn’t being improved by the arrogant pretence of elitism in its most recent campaign. You don’t get back out of the gutter by donning a top hat, putting on a snooty accent and telling people you’re Lord Haughty.

        • quietly defective

          Very true, gsm arena went as far as calling the One button issues minor, just today.

      • amine ELouakil

        lol Media bias? Think again, HTC doesn’t have the ressources nor the money that Samsung have, Samsung sponsers tech websites and they don’t even hide it and you think that they are favoring HTC, that’s some nonsense right there.

        • simpleas

          Lol no money and the products got issues. .GL HTC.

          • amine ELouakil

            Nah they’ll be fine, what they need is to release a global butterfly J with a 5,3″ or more display a sort of fablet if you may say and a proper tablet before holidays season, if they can keep the momuntum without dellueting their new found brand they should be fine

      • urbanpitch

        Yeah, I still don’t see how a metal body makes it an ‘obvious choice’. If another phone has a big screen, does all the same things and is fast as well, how is a removable battery or SD card slot that you can access easily a bad thing? I thought people were bitching at apple for not having thing those features?
        And can we talk about senseui? I don’t know how its better than touchwiz (I’m not saying touchwiz is great either) but damn, HTC ruined the One with that ui.

        • Lil bit

          They both ruined the ui, thanx God for Xperia Z with its clean virgin ui. Sense and tw both reminds me of STDs, esp tw has a sickly bloat to it. Sense could be acceptable without blinkfeed, but then again HTCs quality will never be acceptable, at least Samsung has great quality and service.

  • Stranger from a far coast

    The above article is why people look at specs and the extra hardware capabilities (external sd + removable batt)

    We should all be proud of this figure. Only sheeps are remaining at apple which does not have the above said features.

  • Abdullah

    Samsung haters… Where aree yoooouuuu ???

    • amine ELouakil

      I guess their 900% bigger marketing budget than any other Android OEM is paying off, good for them

  • tomn1ce

    HTC puts out nice phones but for some reason they find a way to cripple the device. Look at the DNA on vzw the only option is a 16GB with no room for expansion and a tiny battery.

    Motorola would only release a high end phone on vzw. If they would release high end phone on all the carriers they would be doing a lot better. Hopefully Google will turn Motorola around and make it a contender. They need to make high end phones for the top 4 carriers and advertise them as they advertised the OG Droid. This time around they should show people what the phone is capable of doing, instead of blowing up walls and fighting cyborgs like in their last series of droid razr commercials. I walk into tmobile stores and I don’t see one Motorola device.

    I’m not sure why LG is not impacting the market a bit more. They have put out nice high end device in the past year. At the same time they have cripple their lower end models by not including enough internal memory and RAM. While Samsung make a low end device with 8/16GB of internal storage and 1GB RAM. LG put in their lower end device 4/8GB of internal storage and 512/768MB. It also seems that they are not advertising as much as they need to. I won’t point out their lack of OS updates that I keep hearing about here and there to their device because the mainstream consumers are not into updates and/or don’t know that the OS is updated from time to time or just don’t care about the latest version of the OS as we do.

  • http://www.facebook.com/Dan.Lingman Dan Lingman

    How does one go from “samsung and apple got 90% of smartphone profits in Q1 2012″ – the actual title of the linked article, to “Samsung accounted for 90 percent of all smartphone profits” – the text in the article above. This is just bad journalism.

Would you like to view our mobile friendly site? Try it out