Design and Display

The Optimus 4X HD is superthin at 0.35 inch; however, it isn't going to win any awards in the beauty department with its sterile look, rigid rectangular shape, and textured plastic battery cover. We received a white version for review; it's much more attractive than the black version I saw at the Mobile World Congress.

The 4X HD has what LG is calling a "True HD IPS" display. Blacks look very deep, colors vivid, and whites bright. The screen does suffer from oversaturation, though, as our color-bar and grayscale tests showed. In our color-bar test, colors bled into each other; in the grayscale test, we had trouble differentiating the light-to-dark shades from one another. We've found oversaturation to be a fairly common problem across multiple phones. But saturation isn't always a bad thing. We've already mentioned the good colors. Details usually were also quite sharp in photos, but text rendering wasn't perfect. Sometimes text looked a bit pixelated and fuzzy when viewing certain websites. But for gaming, video-watching, and casual Web browsing, the Optimus's display is excellent.

Performance

As mentioned earlier, the Optimus 4X HD is LG's first quad-core phone running . This processor actually has a smaller fifth core to help phones conserve battery life. The fifth core handles less-demanding tasks such as active standby and music playback. The PCWorld Test Center ran a series of benchmarks on the Optimus 4X HD including the Geekbench, Andebench and Sunspider benchmarks. The 4X HD outperformed its rivals, the Galaxy S III and the HTC EVO 4G LTE, in both Geekbench and Andebench by a significant amount. It placed last--but just barely--with the Sunspider benchmark, which measures Javascript performance in seconds.