LG Nitro HD review: Live in HD

The gallery has been left unchanged

The LG Nitro HD uses the standard Android gallery. It automatically locates the images and videos no matter where they are stored. It also boasts 3D effects and transitions, which we find rather attractive.

Images and videos placed in different folders appear in different sub-galleries that automatically get the name of the folder, which is very convenient - just like a file manager.

The different albums appear as piles of photos, which fall in neat grids once selected.

No surprises in the gallery

You can use the gestures button to flip through photos and zoom-in on a photo.

Alternatively, you photos can be organized by date with the help of a button in the top right corner, which switches between grid and timeline view. In grid view, there’s a date slider, which can also be used to find photos taken on a certain date.

Gallery options

The Share feature offers quick sharing via Facebook, Twitter, Picasa, Email apps or Bluetooth.

The music layer is full of eye candy

The music looks familiar but it has seen some polish. It can do the usual filtering by album and artist and you have alphabet search and regular search for finding songs quicker.

The music player

Flipping the phone on its side reveals a cool 3D wall of all the albums you have in your music collection. Tap on an album and you’ll see a list of all songs from it. There’s an alphabet scroll at the bottom of the screen to make finding albums faster.

The landscape view of the music player

The Now playing interface places a big album art image in the center with controls above and below it.

Swiping the album art left or right is the easiest way to skip a song or go back to the previous one.

A press and hold on the album art will bring up a menu to search – for the title, the artist or the album title. After that you can pick where to search – your music collection, YouTube or a general Internet search.

Also when you’re playing a song it gets displayed in the notification area. You can also pause and change tracks.

The Now playing screen • the player in the notification area • the equalizer

We found no major drawbacks with the audio quality of the LG Nitro HD.

The video player is simple, but capable

The video player has a fairly simple interface – it’s just a list of all the videos on the devices. There’s an alphabet scroll to help users locate videos faster but that’s about it. You can of course play videos from the Gallery if you prefer its folder-centric organization.

The interface during playback is nothing overcomplicated either – there’s the scrubber to skip to some part of the video along with the play/pause button and next and previous buttons.

The video player

The LG Nitro HD handled just about every video file we threw at it – the usual 3GP and MP4 stuff along with WMV and AVIs using DivX and XviD.

Subtitles worked fine too, with settings for font and size. You can toggle subtitles on and off, but there’s no option to manually point to a subtitles file, so the subtitle filename has to match the video filename.