LG Optimus L9 Android phone (preview)
- — 14 September, 2012 13:35
LG only recently launched its aggressively priced L-Style range of Android smartphones in Australia but the company has already added a flagship device to that category. The LG Optimus L9 offers a huge 4.7in IPS screen, a dual-core processor and a 5-megapixel camera.
LG's current L-Style handsets focus mainly on design and aesthetics and the Optimus L9 is no different. Officially, LG says the L-Style idea is based around five aesthetic elements — a modern square-style that aims to provide comfortable grip, a "floating mass" screen for a slimmer look, a more intuitive arrangement of menu keys, metallic accents and a slim shape. This may be fancy marketing fluff but the Optimus L9 at least appears to look the part.
The Optimus L9 is just 9.1mm thick and has a distinctive metallic strip along its side. It's also pretty light, weighing only 125g. The bezel around the screen is quite slim so despite its large display, the Optimus L9 measures just over 62mm in width. Theoretically, this should make it more comfortable to hold and use single handedly than many other smartphones on the market.
LG's current L-Style smartphones are all pre-paid devices, so you might expect the Optimus L9 to follow that trend. If it does land on pre-paid when it gets an Australian release, the L9 will have one of the largest screens on a pre-paid Android phone. The 4.7in IPS display has a qHD resolution of 960x540, giving the screen a pixel density of 234ppi. This is significantly higher than most other pre-paid phones on the market.
The My Style Keypad allows users to change the key layout depending on whether they're using the phone with one hand or two.
The LG Optimus L9 comes with a rather large capacity 2150mAh battery. The company says it offers "all day long" performance, though we'll be keen to put these claims to the test. LG hasn't yet supplied any official talk time or standby time battery figures, so we'll be interested to see just how long the battery will last in real world use.
LG has equipped the Optimus L9 with reasonable specifications. It's powered by a 1GHz dual-core processor, has 1GB of RAM and comes with 4GB of internal memory. Thankfully, a microSD card slot is present to allow for extra storage. Other features include a 5-megapixel rear camera and a front-facing VGA camera for video calls.
The QTranslator app that uses optical character recognition (OCR) to translate sentences and phrases into other languages.
The LG Optimus L9 will ship with the 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich version of Google's operating system but will once again come skinned with LG's UI overlay. There are two new features of note. The first is a redesigned keyboard called My Style Keypad, which allows users to change the key layout depending on whether they're using the phone with one hand or two. There's also a QTranslator app that uses optical character recognition (OCR) to translate sentences and phrases into other languages by simply capturing a photo of text.
LG hasn't announced if or when the Optimus L9 will be released in Australia but expect it to arrive before the end of the year.
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