LG’s upcoming 720p smartphone, the Optimus LTE, has just been announced in South Korea. The phone, which features high-speed LTE technology as well as an award-winning HD display, is expected to be launched worldwide in the next few months.
The phone’s display is really quite something — it’s already won an award for being the first 720p IPS screen for mobile devices, fitting 1280 x 720 pixels into a 4.5 inch diagonal display for a resultant 329 pixels per inch.
This compares quite favorably to current high end Android handsets, such as the Samsung Galaxy S2 and the HTC Sensation XE. These handsets sport 800 x 480 and 960 x 540 displays, respectively, and struggle to match the iPhone 4’s 960 x 640 Retina Display.
Having an HD display in your pocket will definitely be quite useful – since it’s a standard 16:9 aspect ratio, all media produced for other displays at this aspect ratio (such as YouTube, films and video games) will fit perfectly: no stretching, cropping or black bars in sight. The screen’s also big enough that watching an HD film for two hours doesn’t seem like such a daunting prospect.
The rest of the phone’s specifications are likely to match other 720p smartphones coming out, such as the Nexus Prime and HTC Vigor. This new wave of HD smartphones seem to uniformly pack a dual core 1.5GHz processor, a gigabyte of RAM and a capacious battery to keep up with the screen’s significant power demands. Other technologies, such as Near Field Communication (NFC), USB Host Mode (OTG) and Mobile High Definition Link (MHL) could also be supported.
The first time we expect to see one of these HD phones announced for the US market is over the next few weeks, when Samsung and Google are expected to announce their Samsung Nexus Prime, the reference phone for Android Ice Cream Sandwich. The phone was expected to be announced tomorrow, but Samsung and Google postponed the announcement in respect of the death of Steve Jobs.
If you’re planning on picking up an Android smartphone, either as a long-time Android fan or a newcomer disappointed with the iPhone 4S, then I’d definitely advise patience — we may be just a few months away from these HD smartphones becoming widely available, and they’ll certainly be a worthwhile upgrade over the mediocre displays of the past. The Optimus LTE has only been officially announced for the South Korean market, so don’t rush out to the shops to buy one just yet.
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