LG Optimus 4X HD review

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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. On the Droid 4 and other phones with similar speaker placements the speaker can actually reverberate off your palm and enhance the sound, but I noticed no such effect here.

Between the two silver stripes on the left side of the phone is a single-button volume control, which is so well-hidden that you almost don't notice it, though it's raised enough that your fingers will find it fine. The 3.5mm headphone jack rests up top next to the power button — in my mind that's the right place for headphones, but on a phone this large the power control makes more sense on the right side, where it's accessible to your right thumb without contortionist-level stretching. The Micro USB charging port rests on the bottom of the handset.

There's another LG logo on the front above the display, just underneath the silver stripe for the speaker. Front-facing camera and proximity sensor flank the speaker — each part looks identical to the iPhone's, they're just laid out more or less symmetrically here instead of grouped in the middle. Below the display are three capacitive Android buttons, which only light up when pressed — you'll never notice they're there until you tap the seemingly empty space, and even when they light up they time out so quickly that I simply trained myself to tap a section of the bezel rather than seeking a button.

LG's made great hardware before — I still like the Nitro HD's look and feel a lot — and the Optimus 4X HD is one of its best efforts yet. It's not sleek, but it's handsome, and with different textures and materials it's something even rarer: distinctive in the sea of Android phones (even if it does look a bit like LG's own L7).

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.

Audio performance is severely hampered by the unfortunate placement of the speaker, but once you learn the optimally uncomfortable way to hold the 4X... actually it's still pretty bad. Sound is clear enough, but it's quiet. So quiet that I constantly mashed the Volume Up button even when the on-screen indicator was full, because I didn't think it could possibly be at maximum output. If you're in a quiet space, you can hear it fine, but it's pretty hopeless in any other situation.

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).

If I remember correctly, the first word out of my mouth after turning on the Optimus 4X HD was "finally." I've reviewed a number of LG phones in the last several months, and every single time found the device's biggest flaw to be its software: LG shipped its phones with Gingerbread, and added a horrible skin to boot. It was frustrating to write about, and even more frustrating to use.

Finally, though, LG seems to have figured it out, or at least come much closer. The Optimus 4X HD comes with Ice Cream Sandwich (Android 4.0.3 to be exact), plus the latest version of LG's UI skin. First let's get the bad stuff out of the way: the customized icons for Messaging, Contacts, and the like are still hideous, and I'm not a fan of LG's incessant need to add a white skin to the otherwise dark and attractive Android look. Fortunately the icons are easy to change (just long-press and hit the paintbrush icon), and you probably don't spend much time in the settings menus anyway.

Aesthetic frustrations aside, there's actually a lot to like in the ways LG has customized Android 4.0. We covered a number of these in our review of the Optimus L7, and little has changed here. The lock screen is particularly cool: place your finger anywhere on the screen, and a translucent circle appears around it showing what you'll see when you unlock. You can also unlock straight into one of four apps. I also like the app drawer tabs, which make it easy to only see apps you've downloaded — it's a much faster way to find Twitter than looking through all the pages of preloaded Google apps and bloatware.

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. So it's not surprising that even with such a powerful chipset there are still some slight scrolling and animation issues in Android 4.0, but the Optimus 4X HD's processor does as well as any we've seen. It's a hair below the Galaxy S III and its quad-core Exynos SoC, and just about even with the One X.

With great power comes great power consumption, so the Optimus 4X HD isn't exactly standard-setting in the battery life department. With normal use that bordered on the slightly conservative — lots of web browsing and email, a couple of phone calls, and maybe a YouTube video or three — I squeezed a full day of life from the device, but any night I didn't charge it, it was dead in the morning. The Tegra 3 is such a gaming powerhouse that the phone didn't seem quite as taxed by my Shadowgun sessions as I anticipated, but games, Netflix and the like are still quite power-hungry. Basically all I ask from a phone is that it last me the whole day without me needing to worry, and like too many phones the Optimus 4X HD isn't quite there; it'll last me the whole day, but only if I'm constantly thinking about it.