LG Optimus 4X HD Getting back in the race

LG Optimus 4X HD Getting back in the race

To be brutally honest, LG really hasn’t been making any prize-winning smartphones of late and after the brief high with the Optimus 2X last year, it has had a pretty dry run. With ICS and quad-core being the buzzword, the company has decided to build on the 2x’s success and it may be onto something. The Optimus 4X HD is its flagship Android phone out in the Indian market that goes head-to-head toe-to-toe with the HTC One X and the Samsung Galaxy S III. The 4X HD uses an all-plastic body with some chrome trim along the side to liven it up a bit. It’s slim, light and built well with a good textured feel. It’s not the most attractive phone, but it’s striking, thanks to the 4.7-inch IPS screen. LG bundles a skinned Android 4.0 experience that’s extremely customisable and very easy to use. You also get to choose between various themes and can also use custom icons for your apps. With a Tegra 3 chipset beating inside, the phone is quick and fluid and is rarely bogged down. Audio quality is good with the Dolby Mobile preset and the stock video player easily handles 1080p DivX files, too. You get 16GB of internal memory to play with that’s expandable to 32GB via hot-swap microSD card slot. Along with the usual suite of 3G, DLNA, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, etc., you also get NFC and two programmable tags in the box. The 8MP camera manages to capture good details in images. Macro shots are good and burst mode lets you capture up to six images in quick succession. Video recording maxes out at 1080p, along with image stabilisation giving you stutter-free videos. Battery life is not too bad, but don’t expect it to last more than a day under moderate to heavy usage. At Rs.33,000, it’s the cheapest quad-core handset in the market and we recommend it for its good performance and the value it offers for the price. The slim and light design is a far cry from what we’ve seen from LG in the past and the Optimus 4X HD is just the phone it needs to get back in the race.