LG's Unlikely Smartphone/Tablet
No matter whose smartphone you purchase, there's a decent chance that LG or Samsung manufactures the screen. For anyone curious about how AMOLED (active-matrix organic light-emitting diode) display technology compares to regular LED IPS, LG had a great demonstration intended to highlight the dramatic difference.
LG also had its answer to Samsung's Galaxy Note. Dubbed the Optimus Vu, LG considers this a smartphone with a 5.0" XGA display. It's big enough to be used as an e-book, but not quite large enough to function as a tablet. But that's the market LG seems to be gunning for. On one hand, the screen is large for a phone, which could make it inconvenient to cram into your pocket. Conversely, browsing the Web and composing messages is that much easier with larger virtual keys.
A more performance-oriented design, the new Optimus 4X HD represents LG's first quad-core offering. Sporting Nvidia's Tegra 3 SoC, this smartphone has a gorgeous 4.7" TrueIPS display, and it's also a super-thin 0.35".
Last year, LG announced its Optimus 3D, which offered a glasses-free stereoscopic experience. That product was updated, and is now available as the Optimus 3D Max, which is almost identical to its predecessor aside from a slightly larger 4.3" display. Presently, it ships with Gingerbread, but we're told that an ICS update will be coming soon.
The stereoscopic features of this product are very cool. By using LG's 3D Converter, you can take take 2D content from an application like Google Maps and view it in 3D. The same principle applies to games. To be fair, though, we tried a few different titles and the 3D effect didn't always look outstanding.
That pretty much wraps up what we saw during the first day of MWC. We've finished all of our scheduled press conferences and are almost done with private meetings. Tomorrow we're be on the show floor for the rest of our time in Barcelona. If you want us to track down something specific for you, let us know in the comments section!
