That big 4.7-inch multi-touch display is one of the best feathers in the Optimus G's cap. It's huge, and running at 1280x720 resolution (318 ppi) makes it great for reading, browsing the web or playing games. While 1280x720 is the G's default resolution, LG claims support for up to 1920x1080 for the right video. We'd say it's one of the best displays on the market, alongside the the beautiful HTC One X and Samsung Galaxy S3.
If you live within Sprint's limited (but expanding) 4G service area, your video watching and web browsing should benefit immensely from high speed access. Unfortunately, Sprint has no 4G service in the Bay area as of this writing, so we had to conduct our tests on 3G. More on that later in the review.
Back to the Optimus G's screen, which does a great job of handling of color tones. Watching True Grit via Netflix, the display did excellent work balancing darkness and light sources in nighttime scenes, and capturing the subtle blues of cold, wintery moments.
Still images were even more impressive. The screen makes surfing the web or perusing pictures on Pinterest or Facebook a real pleasure. Viewing angles on the device were also very strong, a pair of friends would have no problem watching a YouTube video together on the bus.
Rotating the phone in and out of landscape mode is a bit disappointing. It's not as snappy as we'd hoped, considering all the horsepower under the hood. This is especially true on the home screen, where you have a to wait a beat for app icons and widgets to pop back in. The browser, however, does an admirable job of quickly resizing the page between landscape and portrait. Overall, not an unreasonable amount of lag, just more than we'd expect from a quad-core phone with 2GB of RAM.
E-book fans, take note, the Optimus G's large screen size and penchant for displaying sharp text make it great for doing a little reading on the go. Fan's of Amazon's Kindle app will appreciate the extra display real estate. There's enough room so that pages don't end up formatted oddly, and you don't need to flip across several screens just read a single paragraph, as on smaller smartphones.
