LG Optimus G E973

Today we’ll be reviewing the LG Optimus G E973.This is a really powerful phone and it’s been a good while since I’ve reviewed powerful phones. This is one of the strongest phones I’ve encountered on my searches through the long and treacherous Internet. This phone is also known as the LG-F180 for the Korean market.

The LG Optimus G E973 is a phone with a hardware configuration that you only see in Sci-Fi movies. To top it all off it looks and functions great. However, one can’t help expecting Apple to jump with a lawsuit on it when they see how the phone looks. After all, it is black with white margins and rounded corners. It may be infringing on their so called “originality”.

But let us stop making fun of Apple. I mean, those lawsuits are their only hope of staying alive in the business nowadays. They haven’t released a product that can be called “good” since their first iPhone. All of their devices have come out weaker than most Samsung products out there, and they still had the guts to call their stuff “revolutionary”. So when you have a large amount of money because people buy your stuff, even though it sucks ( people buy it because they are misguided and believe that if something is more expensive it is automatically the best ), you can afford to go gamble with destiny and try to claim that others are copying you.

SUMMARY

This phone, the LG Optimus G E973, is one of the more powerful phones I’ve seen recently. While the summary was originally intended to point out the good and less good parts of the review, I can’t say I have much to complain about this phone. I do have my question marks which I need to place here and there as I may not have all the information I would like to have on certain parts, but other than that, I can’t say there’s necessarily something wrong with the device.

This phone has almost every thing about it good. The hardware, the screen, the memory, the software. You name it this phone has it. The only problem I have with it is I can’t help but ask myself whether or not some aspects are true. I do have certain places where I have been unable to find more information. The fact is this phone is relatively new and doesn’t necessarily have all the facts revealed about it. But there is enough info lying around to get a general idea about it.

Before you may complain about not revealing anything useful in the summary, this part is intended more as a general guideline for the whole review, rather than offering concrete information. If you truly desire to know more I suggest you keep on reading and find out for yourself since each part is made in such a way that it should ease text scanning quite a bit.

GENERAL

As I already said, I do have certain parts I can’t say too much about due to lack of information. This part is one of them. While we do know this is a 4G phone, we can’t necessarily say the network types of the device. Still, it doesn’t really aid you too much as few people actually know what those network types do and how they operate. Even so, those networks are as following : 2G ( GSM 850, GSM 900, GSM 1800 and GSM 1900 ), 3G ( HSDPA ) and 4G ( LTE ). The LG Optimus G E973 was announced in August 2012 and it is expected to hit the market worldwide somewhere in September 2012.

BODY

The size of this phone is pretty fair. It’s a bit bigger than I would have hoped, but that’s partially due to the fact that the LG Optimus G E973 has a 4.7 inch screen, instead of the optimal size of 4.3 ( but that’s only my opinion ). Even so, the size of the phone is as follows : 131.9 x 68.9 x 8.5 mm and weighs somewhere around 145 grams. All and all the size of the phone isn’t too big and it doesn’t seem to have any particularities related to its body that we should be aware of.

DISPLAY

The display of the LG Optimus G E973 is one of the finest available. I’ve seen all sorts of fine screens in my time, but none that equal the clarity and quality of this one ( well, maybe a few ). The screen of this phone is a True HD-IPS + LCD capacitive touchscreen with 16 million colors. I’ve seen countless comparisons between this type of screen and the AMOLED type of screen, and I can honestly say this one overtakes it.

The size of the screen, as doubtlessly I’ve already said, is 4.7 inches. This screen can house a resolution of 768 x 1280 pixels. The pixel density of this phone is phenomenal. That is in no small part due to the type of screen. This particular type of screen allows for better ppi and quality since it has copper wiring with low resistivity for better transfer of data. That ppi is approximately 318, which is widely accepted by all experts as being the clearest the human eye can perceive.

This phone also has Multitouch on it display, however, one can’t be sure whether or not it is the advanced kind that uses more than two simultaneous fingers on it ( personally I never understood the use for it, but it is bound to have one, else it would not exist ). The LG Optimus G E973 also has the LG Optimus UI v3.0 on it, should you choose to use it ( certain UIs can be turned off if you so desire ).

SOUND

Normally I wouldn’t pay much attention to the audio output capabilities of a phone, but this one is pretty unique on that part. Of course, the alert types, loudspeaker and audio jack are all pretty basic, having nothing added to them to make them stand out from mediocrity. What the LG Optimus G E973 does have that makes it so unique is a very efficient software-based sound enhancement. While some of you may be thinking about “Beats audio”, I regret to tell you that you are wrong. That sound enhancement is Dolby Mobile. It just goes to show you that no matter how important you think something new is, the real important ones will always prevail. In time, the Beats fad will come to pass and not be remembered by anyone anymore, as so many other people / things do.

MEMORY

This is one of the problematic parts. To cut it short, for this part and for the Battery I seem to be lacking a tad bit of necessary information. The info I lack here is the internal storage space of the device. It would be absurd to claim it has none, but then again, I don’t have any numbers to tell me how much it has either. I guess it will be a mystery that only time can solve and we shall see how much it has when it comes out. However much storage space it may have, it still has a Micro SD card slot which can use any card of up to 32 GB.

The RAM of this phone, now here’s an interesting story. Remember how I always complained about technology being available yet us never using it. Perhaps there is the monetary part to consider, but I can appreciate a company that makes use of all the available resources. From the moment that you see you can add more than 1 GB of RAM and the idea spreads, you’d think everybody would go in to get it. But apparently most of the manufacturers are slot to embrace new ideas. LG, however, isn’t. That is why the LG Optimus G E973 has 2 GB of RAM, instead of the normal 1 GB we are all used to and bored of.

DATA CONNECTION

Surprisingly enough for a 4G phone, the LG Optimus G E973 has both GPRS and EDGE. This is a pretty rare feature among these devices and it is good to see that someone is working hard on adding it. Of course we don’t know what Class they each are or what speed they can each reach, but just knowing they are there should be enough. The Speed of this device is : HSDPA, HSUPA and LTE ( however, for none of them I don’t have the info needed to expand ). The WLAN of this device is Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n with Wi-Fi Direct, DLNA and Wi-Fi hostpot. Also, this phone has NFC on it too. Something equally amazing is the fact that this phone has a Micro USB ( MHL ) v2.0 USB port on it. The MHL ones are great since they also act as an HDMI port but through a small converter that comes with the device.

In case you were wondering what the NFC thing is, let me enlighten you. It is a very fast form of data communication ( stands for Near Field Communication ). It acts just like the Infrared of the older phones, but not at such a long range. The maximum distance I believe is 5 cm. The speed of the data transfer is astonishing being able to transmit full movies in seconds. It’s still a pretty limited form of technology and you won’t see too many devices with it yet. Here is the official description :

Near field communication (NFC) is a set of standards for smartphones and similar devices to establish radio communication with each other by touching them together or bringing them into close proximity, usually no more than a few centimetres. Present and anticipated applications include contactless transactions, data exchange, and simplified setup of more complex communications such as Wi-Fi. Communication is also possible between an NFC device and an unpowered NFC chip, called a “tag”. Such tags are widely spread with many uses in our daily life. You will know them when you see them.

CAMERA

The camera of the LG Optimus G E973 is a really powerful one. This camera is one of the cameras you’d never think of finding on an Android device, at least not in the near future. The device has a 13 MP main camera that can photograph at resolutions of 4032 x 3224 pixels and record in 1080p full HD at around 30 frames per second. The features of the camera are as follows : geo-tagging, face detection and image stabilization. The video recorder also has its own features, those being an LED video light. The LG Optimus G E973 also has a secondary frontal camera of 1.3 MP.

BATTERY LIFE

This part, as I’ve mentioned before, I can’t tell too much about. The LG Optimus G E973 is only known to have a Standard Li-Ion 2100 mAh battery. While we do know that, we don’t know how long that battery can sustain life for this phone. I guess this too is a mystery that only time can unravel. When the phone actually does come out, then we shall know for sure.

HARDWARE

The hardware of this phone is really strong. It’s so strong actually, that it would be wise to consider it as strong as a Tegra 3 device. And if you don’t think a Tegra 3 device is strong, I suggest you take a long hard look at the Tegrazone website and what the games for that chipset look like. This phone, the LG Optimus G E973, has a Qualcomm MDM9615 / APQ8064 motherboard, a Quad-Core 1.5 GHz Krait processor and an Adreno 320 video card. It’s able to run pretty much anything at the current time ( and anything to come for the next year, at the very least ).

SOFTWARE

The OS of the LG Optimus G E973 isn’t the latest version as it comes out. When it will hit the market, this phone will have Android OS v4.0.4 Ice  Cream Sandwich. There is a planned upgrade to v4.1.1 Jelly Bean coming, however. So threat not, for you shall be able to update to the latest version as soon as it is available.

FEATURES

The LG Optimus G E973, apart from having all these wonderful things, it is also packed with features. The sensors of this phone are as follows : Accelerometer, Gyro, Proximity and Compass. The messaging on this phone is done via : SMS ( with Threaded View ), MMS, E-Mail, Push Mail, IM and RSS. The browser of this device uses HTML5 and also has built-in support for Adobe Flash. It is yet to be discussed whether or not this phone will have a built-in Radio, but even if it doesn’t, you can always get an app for it. The GPS of this device has built-in support for A-GPS. Also, this phone has Java as well via Java MIDP emulation. The only available color for this device is Black, but it does look splendid in it.

Here is a brief list of what this phone can do :

• Active noise cancellation with dedicated mic
• MicroSIM card support only
• SNS applications
• MP4/H.264/H.263/WMV/DviX player
• MP3/WMA/WAV/FLAC/eAAC+/AC3 player
• Photo viewer/editor
• Document viewer/editor
• Organizer
• Voice memo/dial/commands
• Predictive text input

This concludes our little review of the LG Optimus G E973. Thank you for reading this review. I hope it has been as helpful as possible. If you feel that anything is lacking from this review feel free to leave your suggestions in the comment section below for things which should be added and I will be sure to take them into consideration when writing my future projects. In the meantime, I sincerely hope you had as much fun reading my little review as I had writing it.