LG's not exactly the first name that comes to mind when you think of smartphones. Nor is it the second or third, I'd wager. But the company wants to change that with the Nitro HD, its first attempt at a flagship cell phone in a long time ¡ª the $249.99 (with contract) handset is AT&T's first phone with a 720p display, and one of only three that connects to the carrier's nascent LTE network.
The Android 2.3 phone has other impressive specs to match too: a 1.5GHz dual-core processor, 1GB of RAM, an 8-megapixel rear camera, and 4GB of internal storage (with a card slot for up to 32GB more). Is all that enough to bring LG back into the smartphone game? Read on for the full review. 3mini X12
Hardware / design
The Galaxy S II may get a lot of flak for looking like an iPhone, but that's nothing compared to the resemblance between the Nitro HD and Samsung's big-screened handsets. Of course, there's only so different a phone this large can be, but LG makes no effort to look at all unique ¡ª the roughly textured back even makes the phone feel like a dead ringer for the GSII. The Nitro's different-sized bezels on the top and bottom of the Nitro's screen set it apart, and not in a good way ¡ª most phones have identical or nearly identical space above and below, and the way the Nitro is built feels slightly unbalanced.
Display
The Nitro has a 4.5-inch, 1280 x 720 IPS display, and it's certainly something to brag about: it's beautiful, crystal clear, and has super-accurate colors. The Galaxy S II's Super AMOLED display has a tendency to oversaturate colors, giving them a too-warm temperature, but the Nitro never does that ¡ª what you see is really what you get. The glass is also slightly curved, so it moves cleanly and nicely into the bezel without any sharp edges or obvious seams; it also makes it friendlier to sideways swipes. Its viewing angles are excellent, with very little discoloration as you get off-center (Samsung's AMOLED displays start to glow blue as soon as you move to the side).
Since its screen is larger, the Nitro's 326ppi pixel density is slightly below the HTC Rezound, but it's still really high, and I had absolutely no issues with the Nitro's display when I was using it. It still has large icons and large text, not quite making use of how much real estate it actually has, but everything is readable and clear, and video in particular looks fantastic. I could occasionally make out individual pixels in the RGB stripes layout, but only in particular situations (blue-heavy images, for instance) and with a lot of effort; it's a much better display than on phones like the Droid RAZR, which uses a PenTile layout. Reds are very slightly overexposed on a macro level, but it's not apparent to the naked eye. At this point in the smartphone market, when most high-end phones run the same apps on similar processors with similar memory and build quality, display quality is a make-or-break feature, and a screen like the Nitro's should be a must-have for everyone's next handset.
U8+ Cell Phone
Cameras
The 8-megapixel shooter on the back of the Nitro isn't anything to write home about, but it's as good as the cameras on most other high-end smartphones. It takes fairly clean and crisp photos, though it's effectively useless in low light, and has a really slow shutter speed that makes it tough to use for any kind of motion. It takes a page out of Motorola's book and offers really simple autofocus ¡ª just pause over your subject, and the picture bounces to let you know it's focused ¡ª but it doesn't work all that well, particularly when trying to focus on smaller subjects. Fortunately the tap-to-focus feature works a little better. You get lots of manual control over things like white balance, ISO, and exposure, which is somewhat rare for a smartphone camera, and you can zoom with the volume buttons, which is cool even though I don't ever recommend using digital zoom. The camera's biggest upside is how good the big, sharp screen is as a viewfinder. The front-facing, 1-megapixel camera is ¡ª you guessed it ¡ª bad but fine for video chat.
On the video side, the story is more impressive: the Nitro HD takes really excellent video. It shoots at 1920 x 1088, which is a little off from the standard 1080p video but not a noticeable difference, and shoots it at 30 frames per second. Fast-moving subjects stutter at 30fps, but that's the case with any camera. Recorded audio was excellent, too, with the secondary mic doing a good job of noise cancellation. Wifi F1
Performance, call quality, and battery life
The only problems I ran into seemed to be software-based, and largely related to this skin ¡ª like how the icons in the app drawer randomly disappeared every once in a while, and I had to go out of the drawer and back in to see them again. There's some sluggishness on any Android phone, but the Nitro was no worse (and often better) than other top-of-the-line phones, even with the massive number of pixels it's pushing all the time. Benchmark tests showed the Nitro's fast, too: though it didn't score quite as well as the Samsung Galaxy S II, its 2,400-2,500 Quadrant score range puts it right in line with the HTC Rezound or the Droid RAZR, about which no one would have speed complaints. The browser stumbled a bit on heavy websites (like this one), but in general performed fine. (I hated the real-estate-hogging bar at the bottom of the browser, but that's again a skin problem.)
Wrap-up
The bleeding edge of Android specs currently boils down to three things: a 720p display, LTE support, and Ice Cream Sandwich. The LG Nitro HD has two of them, and thanks to Google's new 18-month-update policy it should nail the third ¡ª but 18 months is a long time and I'm always wary of assuming timely and easy updates. Even if and when the Nitro HD does get updated to Android 4.0, it won't be worth much if LG's skin makes the transition too. If you live in one of AT&T's LTE test markets, you'll want a phone that can support the super-fast network, and right now this is AT&T's best LTE phone. But if you can wait a few weeks or months, you'll be much better served by a phone with better battery life and without the Nitro's software problems.