LG to launch four 4G smartphones in Oz

LG will launch four 4G smartphones in Australia by early next year after admitting it is dragging behind other smartphone manufacturers.

LG Australia mobile head Ben Glimmerveen told PC World Australia the company had “dropped the ball” with its smartphone strategy over the past year, but would attempt to push ahead with a new 4G range. 

He declined to comment on details of the upcoming devices, but said LG would likely increase the range to over four handsets. 

"We were behind the game in smartphones," Glimmerveen said. "That's a global admission and it's good that we've done that. What we've done now is we've been on the front foot with the next tier of where this telecommunications phase is going which is LTE."

LG officially unveiled its Optimus 4X HD quad-core smartphone in February at Mobile World Congress, and last week announced availability to western Europe in June.

LG Australia did not respond to CRN for confirmation of local pricing and availabilty.

The smartphone is touted as a rival to HTC’s One X.  It is powered by a 1.5Ghz NVIDIA Tegra 3 processor, running Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich.

A rear 8MP camera and 2150mAh battery sit alongside 1GB of RAM and 16GB of internal storage.

Galaxy S III rival in the works?

Reports leaked last week indicate LG is gearing up to launch a smartphone that will outclass the HTC One X and Samsung Galaxy S III in the battle of most powerful.

The LG Eclipse 4G LTE, or LG LS970 as it appears Brief Mobile, offers a Snapdragon quad-core S4 processor running at 1.5GHz as well as 2GB of RAM.

The smartphone is reported to hold a 13MP camera as well as a 4.67in LCD display at just 8.7mm thin. 

Samsung's Galaxy S III boasts a 1.4GHz quad-core Exynos processor with 1GB RAM, while the HTC One X carries a 1.5Ghz Tegra 3 quad-core chip with 1GB RAM.