LG'Optimus 4X Features

The Optimus 4X HD is big, but it's not larger than its 4.7-inch display requires. 5.21 inches tall and 2.68 inches wide, its footprint is about the same as the Galaxy S III or the One X, and thanks to a slightly more squared-off, 8.89mm-thick design, it actually feels a bit smaller in your hand. Make no mistake, though: this is still a huge phone. The phone is white on all four sides, with two silver stripes running along the edges. It doesn't look or feel as good as the One X, or a phone like the Lumia 900 or iPhone 4S, but it's certainly attractive, and nicely made.

The back of the Optimus 4X HD is lined with slightly raised diagonal ridges, and looks almost like painted wood — it still feels like plastic, and the back is oddly easy to pull off, but it both looks and feels better than the slimy back on most plastic phones. There's a big LG logo on the back, along with an off-center camera lens surrounded by a square silver border and adjacent to a small LED flash. The speaker is also on the back, in the bottom left corner; that's exactly where your palm goes as you hold the phone in your right hand. In fact, there's no good way to hold the 4X in one hand without covering the speaker.
The Optimus 4X HD comes with a 4.7-inch, 1280 x 720, IPS display. 720p isn't itself an impressive feat anymore, and that's awesome — screens this large really can't be any lower-res and still be usable. The 4X's display is excellent, but that's not surprising: the Nitro HD and Spectrum both proved that the company knows how to make a good screen, and the fact that LG's been a major TV manufacturer for many years certainly helps.

The IPS display isn't quite as high-contrast or vivid as the Super LCD on the One X and Evo 4G LTE, but it's still very good, with near-180 degree viewing angles and excellent color reproduction. It's bright enough to be readable in sunlight, and its 312 PPI pixel density is well into "retina" territory — you definitely won't notice individual pixels, a fact also helped by the RGB layout rather than the dreaded PenTile look. Even small text is very readable, and the screen is sharp enough that even the subtle texture on the Contacts icon is noticeable. It's not the best phone display I've seen (that's the One X, and it's not close), but the 4X's screen is as good as you'll find outside HTC's flagship.
The 4X HD is available unlocked in Europe and elsewhere around the world, and should work with any GSM network. I used it on AT&T, and results were about what I expected: I got download speeds averaging about 1.5Mbps and upload speeds about 300Kbps — those are firmly 3G speeds (there's no LTE support in the international 4X HD), but they're about what I'd expect from that connection. Reception was solid and consistent, even hanging onto full (or at least "full") service when other handsets started to drop. I suspect LG's padding its bars, and the handset didn't keep service while other devices lost it, but it's still a solid performer.
Other than the speaker (and thus speakerphone) problems, call quality is pretty good. The microphone is loud and clear, so other people heard me really well; the earpiece is a tiny bit muffled, but not enough to be a problem, and though it's not the loudest earpiece out there it at least gets loud enough to be audible (unlike the speaker).
Unlike the L7, which has an antiquated Snapdragon S1 processor that can't keep up anymore, the Optimus 4X HD has specs that rival any other handset on the market. It's powered by a quad-core 1.5GHz Tegra 3 processor, which as we've seen in the One X and other devices is as fast as any other SoC out there (though the Snapdragon S4 is slightly more power-efficient). Coupled with 1GB of RAM, the Tegra 3 is more then up to the task of powering Ice Cream Sandwich. As we've noticed before and as Project Butter confirmed once and for all, the remaining slowdowns and lags in Android — rotating the screen, or launching the app drawer — are Android issues, and can't be fixed with a faster processor.