LG Optimus 4X HD Review

LG had announced the Optimus 4X HD in February this year, but it took a couple of months to land on Indian shores. The Optimus 4X HD is the company’s finest offering yet. It has got everything you would need - and want - in a smartphone. Yes, it’s LG’s answer to the HTC One X and the Samsung Galaxy S III. But is LG a little late to the party? Or do users have reason enough to choose the Optimus 4X HD over its more prominent Korean counterpart? Let’s have a look.

Three backlit capacitive buttons

Design and Build Quality

The Optimus 4X HD comes in two colours, white and black. We got the black model for review. At first look, it didn’t look remarkably different from the other Androids we’ve recently reviewed. A closer look gave us a better sense of satisfaction. First, this phone doesn’t look plastic or cheap or flimsy; it’s a nicely made, well-built device. Two silver rims run across the sides of the device with a triangular strip in between, which is just plain aesthetics. The back has a matte contoured finish to it that gives a good reassuring feel while holding the phone. The 4X HD may not be very beautiful to look at, but it’s certainly not ugly. Let’s take a quick tour of this device.

The ports

The 4X HD is huge. The front comprises of the large 4.7-inch IPS display with three backlit capacitive buttons at the bottom, a front camera and the LG logo at the top. A power button, a microphone and a 3.5 mm headphone jack are located at the top. On the left is a volume rocker, while at the bottom is a microUSB slot bang in the centre along with the secondary noise cancellation microphone. The back has the second LG logo, an 8 megapixel camera, an LED flash and a speaker grill towards the bottom. Under the hood there is a 2150 mAh battery, the SIM card slot and a hot swappable microSD card slot, which is not located under the battery. 

The Optimus 4X HD is one big phone. At 133 grams, it’s only a wee bit heavier than the One X on paper, but the device has a nice solid feel to it. The build quality is good and there aren’t any flimsy flaps or creaks that you have to worry about. Though it may not have the aesthetic feel of the One X, this Optimus has enough class to be classified as a flagship phone.

Available in white as well

Features and Performance 

Interface

LG has put the best of everything in the 4X HD. It’s powered by a 1.5GHz quad core Tegra 3 processor with 16GB of internal storage and 1GB of RAM – enough to keep it chugging all day long or till the battery lasts, at optimum speed. LG has put its custom Optimus UI 3.0 skin on top of Ice Cream Sandwich 4.0.3. It’s a welcome improvement over the previous iterations of the skin. The new Optimus UI allows you a lot more customizations. The drop down notification bar lets you add and modify your desired power control options. You can change the look of your icon and though the available library of icons isn’t the best, you have the option to create your own icon. The phone comes with four preset themes as well, with each one having a distinct layout, style and icon set. Cozywall and Marshmallow not your style? You can settle for the more demure, professional looking and simple Biz theme. These themes are besides the original Optimus theme. 

The interface - customizable

It’s these small personalized improvements that incline us towards recommending the new Optimus UI. However, the overall look could still do with some more improvements starting off with better colour schemes for the icons and the menus.  The menu is neatly categorized into Apps, where you have the default content and your downloaded stuff; Downloads, to quickly find the stuff you’ve downloaded; and Widgets, to view and add the widgets you need to your home screen. 

This latest version of the Optimus UI works butter smooth on the 4X HD. There wasn’t a single time when the phone actually hung or slowed down, which is telling for an Android device. While this comment may be great for this smartphone, it’s not particularly good news for the resource hungry operating system. Multitasking is an absolute breeze. We opened a couple of memory intensive apps and there was no hint of lag whatsoever. However, considering there are multiple cores continuously at work underneath that hood, there’s nothing less we’d have settled for.

Benchmark scores

The Optimus 4X HD was put through a set of synthetic benchmarks and we compared it with similar priced handsets. Samsung’s Galaxy S III was a clear winner, as can be seen from the images below, but the other handsets were all placed at a joint second.