 This is David with The Verge and this is the LG Optimus 4X HD. It's a smartphone currently only available in Europe, but it's probably a pretty good indication of what we'll see from LG in the US in the future. The phone itself, as you can see, is kind of huge. It's 5.2 by 2.7 inches and weighs just under 6 ounces, so it's not particularly big for this kind of a phone, but it's still really large and kind of hard to use in one hand. It's well made. It has this kind of ridged silver back that, it's still plastic, but it's a little better to hold than some of the glossy phones we've seen even from LG. And it has these two silver stripes along the edges, which are really more design flair than anything. Overall, the phone's really well made. It's thin and just the way it's designed, it feels even smaller than it actually is. There are three capacitive buttons on the bottom instead of the typical on-screen buttons, which I actually kind of like. It sits in the bezel and you can't really even see them when you turn them on, so you just kind of get used to where you tap. The homework feature obviously is the 720p 4.7 inch display. 720p is pretty much standard for a high-end phone now, and LG has actually put this same display in a couple of its phones before. But it's a really great display. It has great colors and great viewing angles. The only problem with it is there's this thin black stripe around all of the edges that makes the screen feel like it's set really far back into the phone. So it feels like there's a disconnect between your finger and what you're actually tapping. It's not a huge problem, but it's not quite as nice an experience. As I mentioned, the Optimus 4x HD is only available internationally, and that means it's an unlocked phone and you can basically just drop any SIM card in you want. And so your mileage will vary depending on what carrier you use. The microphone on the phone is great. The earpiece is okay. And unfortunately the speaker on the back is actually pretty bad. It goes right where your hand wants to go as you hold the phone in one hand, so it really muffles the sound. But even when it's free and you kind of awkwardly hold it so that you can use it, it's still really quiet and you can really only hear it in a quiet room where you're all by yourself. There are two cameras on the phone. There's an 8 megapixel camera on the back with an LED flash, and there's a 1.3 megapixel camera on the front. Both are fine. The one on the back is actually better than most phone cameras. It has really good colors and better dynamic range than most, but you still get soft and noisy images and it's really nothing special. The phone's running Android 4.0 and it's running the same LG skin that we've seen before and disliked on a couple of other phones, but it's really, really improved as is Android in the jump from gingerbread to ice cream sandwich. The first thing you'll see is this really cool new lock screen. You can either drag an app out to launch straight into that app, or if the screen is locked and you just tap, it gives you this kind of window into whatever you're about to open. It's not really added functionality, it's just pretty cool. There's also in the app drawer these new tabs, so you can either swipe through all your apps or you can just see apps that you've downloaded or go to widgets. It's just an easier way to navigate through, especially if you have a lot of apps on your phone and there's bloatware and stuff like that. There's also in the notification pull down, it has the same power and radio controls as most, but you can edit them and there are a few that you can add or you can just easily rearrange them. You can quickly, if you want, take a note just with the quick memo app. You can doodle on a screenshot or take your own picture or do whatever you want. It's just a quick way to take a note from pretty much anywhere you are. The phone's powered by a quad core 1.5 gigahertz Tegra 3 processor and is really fast. In general, everything you do is as smooth as we've come to expect from ice cream sandwich and it's fast and reliable and even for pretty heavy gaming holds up pretty well. Battery life on the phone is also surprisingly solid given how powerful the internal processor is. Obviously, your mileage will vary based on the carrier and if it comes to the US and gets LTE, it'll probably be even lower, but it's still pretty solid. Overall, LG's previous efforts with phones basically all got something significant wrong. Some had issues with software being outdated and ugly and just bad. Sometimes the phone was underpowered and other times it was just an issue with build quality like we found on the Spectrum. But this time, it does all of those things right. Ice cream sandwich is great and the skin has its issues but is actually genuinely useful for a lot of things. The build quality is solid. It's not spectacular. It kind of looks like the Galaxy S3, but it's really solid and the performance is as good as any ice cream sandwich phone we've seen. I'll still take stock Android on the Galaxy Nexus over this any day, but it's really been scaled back and is definitely in line with some of the other manufacturers out there. It's not as good right now as the Galaxy S3 or the HTC One X, but if this phone does come to the U.S. if and when, it should be a real contender.