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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Death666Angel - Thursday, August 30, 2012 - link
Why does it belong there? In my opinion it is counter intuitiv to the way I put the phone back in my pocket. It is usually upside down in my pocket when I am not listening to music because that is how my hand can most easily put it there after I hold it in my hand. Now, when I listen to music via ear plugs I always have to change my grip before putting it away, so that the ear plug is not getting bent or pokes my thigh or something. Very annoying but it seems to become the standard and apparently some people like it, but I habe never seen an explanation for it.JimmiG - Thursday, August 30, 2012 - link
LG really need to improve their support for me to consider them again. The Optimus 2X has *still* not been updated with ICS. First it was going to come out in Q2, then Q3, then LG said the update had been pulled and wouldn't be released at all. The latest word is that it will at least be released for Korean customers, but maybe not worldwide.Meanwhile, Nvidia refuses to release the Tegra2 drivers needed for third parties like CyanogenMod to release a fully functioning custom ROM.
Of course, the Optimus 4X is already running a current version of Android, but what happes in a year and a half when ICS/Jelly is no longer the latest and greatest?
manik. - Thursday, August 30, 2012 - link
Good one from LG. The UI is, indeed, good.mosu - Friday, August 31, 2012 - link
After installing Android apps on a high variety of devices, a specific range and mainly no multimedia related I've come to the conclusion that Tegra 3 sucks.Could someone better informed than me provide a link for existing products with A15 , preferably OMAP or Exynos chips inside?Barnassey - Friday, August 31, 2012 - link
You need to correct the maxximum size for micro sd on the GS3. It can take up to a 64GB card.subscrive - Sunday, September 2, 2012 - link
LG lost its way when they announced that they wont support upgrade to ICE for some of their models.All these new models will not help. Only competition blunder can.
Try http://www.shopatsite.com/v1/
Its different.