LG announced at CES 2012 its latest Android smartphone which not only takes on the iPhone when it comes to screen quality but also trumps it. They call;ed it LG Spectrum LG LTE. The company released the LG Spectrum, the Verizon version of the phone, at this year's CES 2012 in Las Vegas after the carrier in the US officially announced it.
The Display
The Spectrum is anormous the device sports a big 4.5-inch screen (which has been given an HD IPS display with a pixel density greater than the iPhone) that dominates the front of the device leaving just enough space for the menu, back, and home buttons beneath it. It measures in at 135.4 x 68.8 x 10.4 mm, making it a tad bulkier than the Optimus LTE in size, although it’s not too big to handle. At 4.5-inches there is plenty of space, but this is pared with a high resolution of 1280 x 720 pixels and Gorilla Glass, which is excellent; sharp and clear with extremely accurate colors.
The display is certainly impressive and with a ppi of 326 - the same as the iPhone 4S - it will render fine detail in things like text really well. It also doesn't suffer the same sort of problems that the Galaxy Nexus does at low brightness settings; although the whites do grey-out at minimum brightness, they don't get gritty and dirty like they do on Google's Ice Cream Sandwich launch device.
The moment you lock your eyes onto the LG Spectrum's 4.5-inch IPS display you don't want to look away. The extra pixels – 329 pixels per inch – isn't that much more than the iPhone 4S' 326 pixels an inch but the quality is fantastic. The phone comes pre-loaded with ESPN SportsCenter app – an app which has always been a favourite at TechRadar towers. And now it's even better as it can now offer a 720p live stream to users, something the LG Spectrum handled effortlessly.
We’ve seen 720p screens before, such as that of the Samsung Galaxy Nexus, but the LG Spectrum uses an IPS-based screen rather than the Super AMOLED type seen in most other top-end mobile screens. Each screen type has its advantages and disadvantages, but this phone has convinced us that IPS might be a better solution all-round. It doesn’t tend to suffer from the colour issues of AMOLED, which often over-saturates colour and becomes cast with a blueish tint when viewed from an angle.
IPS doesn’t offer the same awesome black depth and sheer contrast of OLED, but limitations here tend to be less conspicuous than those of AMOLED screens. Apple’s iPhone 4 and 4S use IPS panels, as does the iPad 2, and are the key flagships of the tech. However, the LG Spectrum’s screen is rather more advanced, offering similar pixel density at a significantly larger size.
Compare to Galaxy S which has a tendency of giving everything a warm cool temperature, with a slightly red and Orange tint, LG displays are much more accurate and viewing angle is really good.
On the other hand the LCD looks like it's set way below the protective layer of Gorilla Glass. is not like the iPhone's screen, which is laminated to the glass to make it seem like it's right on the surface, the Spectrum's display looks like it's far away from your finger as you tap it.
The blacks on the Spectrum's screen render more like dark gray and the UI is filled with tiny text and big icons, which feels like it's missing the sweet spot of this resolution, although that's a software problem.
The Camera
Flip it over and you'll find some detailing on the back cover making it bumpy rather than smooth. It feels nice to hold though. You also get an 8-megapixel camera on the back, along with an LED flash and the bonus bits of image stabilisation and face detection and a 1.3 megapixel front-facing camera, with the rear camera capable of capturing 1080p video. The camera offers Full HD video capture of average quality and the phone will play HD video, but there is sadly no HDMI as there is on the Optimus 2X and Optimus 3D.
The camera colors are accurate and the device is fast as it takes less than seconds to "Focus" bear in mind is not as faster as Galaxy nexus though but is an improvement compare to other smartphones.
Autofocus is quick and simple, locking on without you needing to do anything as it just bounces when it's ready to shoot. however the autofocus doesn't work that well, and most of the photos look as if the camera couldn't ever find a real focus, and just shot something that seemed close enough, although tap-to-foculs improve slightly but still not complete fix.
The font camera is 1.3MP which is a standard for a smartphone, its is faster but you get some unusably noisy photos, although is ok for video calling which is what was designed for.
The video recording is standard as the device shoots 1080p ( 1920 x 1088) video, as well as 720p and a sereas of lower resolutions. The lighting adjustment is not too good and has lack of image stabilization.
The Design
Buttons are kept to a minimum: the power/standby sits on the top and the volume down the left. Across the bottom of the screen you have touch controls, the central "home" control looks like a physical button but it isn't. The menu and back touch controls are pretty much invisible unless the back illumination comes on, although once you know they're there it isn't a problem. In additional the phone is a little bit on the chunky side (especially when compared to an iPhone).
Its 10.4mm shell is plastic, common in slim phones, but the glossy finish doesn’t exactly make the phone feel like a million dollars. A little texture to a phone body, or a concerted effort to make it feel as densely-packed as possible, is needed to make a handset feel like a smartphone superstar and this one doesn’t quite.
The smartphone is the same size as Galaxy Nexus, but slightly lighter but thicker. A hefty chunk of the Spectrum's 5.33-inch height is due to the three capacitive buttons below the display (the menu and search buttons are combined into one), real estate the Nexus doesn't need because Android 4.0 uses on-screen capacitive buttons. However the Spectrum's buttons are design in a way makes the Spectrum look cheap. The three button looks different than a standard Android keys, and there is silver border around the home button.
There is a silvery ring around the side of the Spectrum which makes the phone looks nice and is a change from ordinary LD designs. Its ports and jacks are off-putting, the power button, Micro USB slot, and headphone jack are all crowded on top, while all the other edges are empty except for the volume controls on the left side. (Also, the same insanely breakable piece of plastic covering the Nitro’s USB port sits atop the Spectrum’s as well.).
Most of the smartphones has a cheap texture feeling around the back on the smartphone, althouugh the Spectrum is the opposite, the back is smooth, checkerboard platterned and feels greasy and slimy whne you hold it. This can be a good thing and a bad thing as the device feels stick and can put off some people.
The Engine Room
The device is powerd with 1.5GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon MSM8660 dual-core processor complete with Adreno 220 graphics and as it is coming out in the US is also uses LTE – so high-quality video streaming looks great on the device and comes without buffering and it has 1GB RAM. The general perfomance is solid although sometimes you get lag when moving from one screen to another or press home button but is not a big deal. With this processore to be honest almost everything happen instantly and the phone is great for playing games also.
The smartphone has amazing browser perfomance which is very impressive, although just like other dual-core smartphone it suffer slightly on the site with heavy images. Other than that the browsing is smoother than Galaxy Nexus and the call quality is very good.
Quad-core tablets are already here, but quad-core phones that’ll actually sell to the general public are not. Processors like the Spectrum’s should stay pretty cutting-edge for at least a few months - a long time in the smartphone game.
The speakers perfomance arent that amazing, but is usable.
Storage and Battery
The phone have 1GB of RAM, 8GB of internal storage and a 16GB microSD card will come with the phone, though it will support cards up to 32GB. It will have a sizeable 1830mAh battery.
Software
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Conclusion
Overall it feels and plays like a powerful phone but in its current guise the design isn't the most inspiring: we don’t think it looks as pretty as the Galaxy Nexus, but that display certainly does a fantastic job.
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