LG Nitro HD Review: 4G LTE on AT&T

[Julio Franco]

Read the full article at:
https://www.techspot.com/review/474-lg-nitro-hd/

Please leave your feedback here.

 

[Guest]

Hopefully ice cream sandwich will later improve the lag and battery issues.

 

[Guest]

About time LG brings out a new Windows mango phone, same camera as the nitro with a 4-inch oled display. Don't need any more android phones, the market is full of them and they are not even as snappy as windows phone 7.5 even with their 1ghz something dual cores.

 

[princeton]

but the phone just isn't as smooth as its peers from Samsung and HTC.

Definitely not as smooth as the SGSII, but HTC? Oh you mean those HTC peers where all animations in the launcher are capped at 30fps? So either every animation on the Nitro is stuttery or the reviewer has never used a Sense 3.0 device.

 

[Guest]

The lag mentioned is only due to poor android OS running it. Hopefully ICS will solve that.

 

[lawfer]

Princeton said:

but the phone just isn't as smooth as its peers from Samsung and HTC.

Definitely not as smooth as the SGSII, but HTC? Oh you mean those HTC peers where all animations in the launcher are capped at 30fps? So either every animation on the Nitro is stuttery or the reviewer has never used a Sense 3.0 device.

He didn't mention which HTC devices, and consequently, which Sense version is not comparable to the LG Nitro. Not specifying leaves his statement--unarguably--open to interpretation as "HTC" encompasses all HTC phones (at least those newly released, worthy enough to be deemed comparable) with HTC Sense 3.2 or newer. And, as it turns out, any phone that has at least been updated to Sense 3.2 released in September of last year (which should count roughly for 60% of all HTC phones), the FPS is not capped to 30, but to 60. At least that's what HTC claims.

The Nitro stutters because of the poorly designed interface and lack of hardware acceleration. As if Android 2.3 is in and of itself stutter-free... lol, what am I saying?

 

[princeton]

There is no Sense 3.2, I'll assume you mean 3.5 because that sounds about right .

Oh and it doesn't matter what HTC claims, because logcat says it's 30 on 2.1, 3.0 and 3.5. Oh also using one of the devices is a good way to tell it's not 60. Just put them beside the SGS II or the Galaxy Nexus and swipe your finger. Remember HTC is not known for "truthful" statements. I'm sure you heard about their new Beats Audio which sounds like they put a nice sound chip in their phones, but is really just an equalizer that causes overpowering mids.

 

[lawfer]

Princeton said:
There is no Sense 3.2, I'll assume you mean 3.5 because that sounds about right .

Oh and it doesn't matter what HTC claims, because logcat says it's 30 on 2.1, 3.0 and 3.5. Oh also using one of the devices is a good way to tell it's not 60. Just put them beside the SGS II or the Galaxy Nexus and swipe your finger. Remember HTC is not known for "truthful" statements. I'm sure you heard about their new Beats Audio which sounds like they put a nice sound chip in their phones, but is really just an equalizer that causes overpowering mids.

In reality, there's no official "HTC Sense 3.2." The HTC Sense update 3.29.651.5, which was released to all HTC devices after the EVO, is a maintenance update. This maintenance update fixed the following: an issue with calendar where you couldn't edit some events; support to sync multiple Gmail accounts; uncap the 30 FPS; and fix an issue where GPS signal was intermittent.

So, technically, phones that have--officially, that is-- "Sense 3.0", could have anything in-between 3.0 and 3.2.x.

As far as putting one beside the other--putting aside the fact that Android's Dalvik VM is inherently quite limited--one thing is having an UI interface (note: not the OS) optimized to use hardware acceleration and be capped to 60 FPS, and another is having one <i>not</i> optimized to use hardware acceleration and yet be capped to 60 FPS. I assume difference between these two would be evident, as you seem to quickly claim that one is capped to 30 and the other isn't; but, ultimately, both will do not run at true 60 FPS until actual hardware acceleration is achieved through the OS (that is, by not having the UI thread handle animations) and until Dalvik is properly improved. So, in essence, they are incomparable, as the same is seen on other devices running Android 2.3, including Samsung's. It's not an HTC thing. It's an Android thing.

One of the many reasons why Android phones have a 30 FPS caps (specially in the photo gallery app), is because neither the OS' UI hierarchy or the very GUI are optimized to take advantage of graphical processing power. But then again, all of this then becomes irrelevant, if you consider that the way the OS handles this processing power is inefficient anyway. Because of this inefficiency, it is, in actuality, a lot easier to see stutter or hiccups in animation drawing in Android 2.3 and 3.0 when FPS is capped to 60, than when it is to 30, as 30 FPS is the threshold for movement to the human eye. Once you reach 60 FPS, the difference between 30 FPS and 60 is very evident, but even more evident is when such animations do not stay at 60 FPS or close enough. Thus, even if HTC made Sense HW accelerated, because of OS limitations, difference would be somewhat noticeable in comparison to non-HW accelerated UIs, but in real world it is outright irrelevant.

TL; DR

Galaxy phones with TouchWiz 4.0, for instance, have hardware acceleration on the GUI front. However, while these phones are capped to 60 FPS, they do not run at true 60 FPS because of OS limitations. In contrast, HTC phones <i>without</i> GUI hardware acceleration, yet capped to 60 FPS, are somewhat slower at drawing certain animations. Even if both sides were even--that is, even if both phones, and their respective user interfaces were marginally optimized to user HW acceleration (and be capped at 60)--in reality they both would not really run at true 60 FPS. While one could be noticeably smoother than the other, it is, intrinsically, an efficiency issue with how the OS handles graphical power. Nonetheless, the fact remains that whether one is smoother or not, both are capped to 60 FPS (hitting that cap, and staying there throughout all UI animations is the problem). And, consequently, the lack in "smoothness" when compared to a properly optimized UI (such as TouchWiz 4.0), should not be entirely attributed to the manufacturer, but to the unoptimized operating system.

 

[Guest]

I can upgrade now and for once in my life, I really want a current phone. Since it looks like Sprint isn't getting any WP8 phones anytime soon, I've been thinking about getting one of these since we have AT&T’s 4GLTE in New York. I really want to test out these 4G LTE speeds for transmitting my graphics design work.