LG Nitro HD

From David Pierce’s review of the LG Nitro HD Android phone:

There’s one big, huge, giant tradeoff to using an LTE handset, and that’s battery life — if you’re using LTE with any kind of regularity, the battery meter can barely go down fast enough. I’ve never gotten a full day’s battery life out of the Nitro HD, even when not using it regularly; the phone seems to lose its battery even while in standby, which means leaving it unplugged overnight is going to make for a rude awakening (or a missed one, if your phone dies) in the morning. Using Wi-Fi whenever possible largely solves this problem, but it also defeats the point of LTE. When you do use it regularly, beware: streaming a 20-minute episode of Arrested Development lopped 12 percent off my phone’s battery. There’s no way to toggle LTE on the device itself, but third-party developers have made apps that do so for other phones, so keep your fingers crossed that one comes for the Nitro too.

It sucks your battery continuously, even while idle, and you can’t turn it off. But it’s fast. I can’t think of a single paragraph that better encapsulates the difference in mindsets between Android phone makers and Apple.

As usual for The Verge, the video review is excellent. Gives you a good idea of what the hardware (chintzy to my eyes, other than the display) and software (god-awful) actually look like.

★ Wednesday, 7 December 2011