LG Optimus 4X HD: Tegra 3 Handsets Stay Global
by Vivek Gowri on August 29, 2012 4:30 AM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- LG
- Ice Cream Sandwich
- Mobile
- Tegra 3
At this point, Tegra 3 is mostly a known quantity, but the O4X HD was my first day-to-day experience with a T3-based smartphone. It's a pretty fun SoC, for sure. This is a pretty impressive amount of performance packed into a phone, but it does come with some drawbacks. Think of it like the first generation of quad-core notebooks – there’s too much power here. Simple as that. It’s fast, yes, breathtakingly so. But it’s also pretty power hungry, and heats up more than you would ever expect a phone to do. I can't wait for the die-shrunken Tegra 3+, which will certainly go a long ways towards quelling these issues.
Something worth noting is the lack of any immediate day to day performance differences between this and Krait-based devices like the One S or even older A9 dual cores like the Galaxy S2 or Galaxy Nexus - they're all fast enough to run a stock or lightly-skinned ICS build smoothly, and all of the remaining UI slowdowns are simply issues internal to ICS. Google basically admitted as much with Jelly Bean's Project Butter - no matter how much hardware you throw at ICS, those occasional frame rate dips will continue to exist. I'm admittedly not a particularly demanding smartphone user like, say, Brian is. I do a lot of messaging, a decent amount of browsing, and then the usual smartphone stuff like Facebook, Gmail, Twitter, camera, etc. But almost no gaming, and not that much in the way of HD video decoding. Honestly, Tegra 3 hasn't done anything for me that OMAP4 and Exynos 4210 weren't already able to do just fine. So while it's awesome that quad-cores have come to phones, I'm not certain that it'll change your smartphone usage patterns significantly unless you have a specific need for a ton of compute horsepower.
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TheJian - Wednesday, September 5, 2012 - link
I'm not sure any of these benchmarks even matter. It's kind of like benchmarking office and how fast it waits on me to type in word. Until they start benchmarking ACTUAL games (which is the only way I know how to judge one vs. the other and my fun on them out to a tv :)), the only other interesting thing is battery life.I can't play sunspider (it's not a game last I checked), have no interest in linpak etc. I want to know how they perform when output to TV over hdmi and using my xbox360 controller to have some fun. Consoles days are numbered, but I guess they can breathe easy until we start getting some real benchmarks that actually tell us something. The same can be said about bandwidth memory tests on desktops etc. All pointless accept to prove your stuff is operating correctly. I can't have fun or get any work done running sandra benchmarks ;) So who cares? I can't wait for a GAME mobile phone benchmark (I mean a real game, not some 3dmark crap for phones). Fraps for phones? :) SeeMeGaming? As Vivek already said, pretty much anything runs fine on all the latest phones. So gaming will be the differentiators.
piroroadkill - Wednesday, August 29, 2012 - link
One thing: I wish manufacturers would stop using Tegra 3 in phones.Use Dual core Krait, and increase the size of the battery... and then we're talking.
krazyfrog - Wednesday, August 29, 2012 - link
Your weather widget is showing Seattle weather but your network ID is Airtel. It seems you are based out of India. :)krazyfrog - Wednesday, August 29, 2012 - link
Never mind. Commented before I saw the camera page.rocketbuddha - Wednesday, August 29, 2012 - link
The picture of the temple seems to be the Madurai Meenakshiamman temple.VivekGowri - Wednesday, August 29, 2012 - link
Thillai Natraja Kovil in Chidhambaram.Belard - Wednesday, August 29, 2012 - link
Ya still get slapped anyway... :)*slap!!*
VivekGowri - Wednesday, August 29, 2012 - link
Screenshots/images taken at different times, so some happened while I was in India, some after I got back to Seattle :)jramskov - Wednesday, August 29, 2012 - link
LG doesn't exactly have the best track record in that regard...cserwin - Wednesday, August 29, 2012 - link
As a G2X owner, I would say that you will never see an update.The G2X has soured me on Android completely. It's pushed me into community supported ROMs just to have some semblance of a functional smart phone. And bless their hearts, but the community support for this phone has been marginal - soured by poor driver support from NVIDIA and LG.
This stuff is sold in the U.S. on 2 year commitments. But the manufacturers and carriers aren't committed 5 minutes to this hardware.
Really, how much research should I need to do before I purchase a smartphone with a decent feature set and expect it to work? It is complete bullshit the level of quality and consistency in the Android ecosystem, and LG wears the crown for putting lipstick on a pig.
This phone will never be updated. And it will fail you weekly.