LG Nitro HD review: Live in HD

An 8MP camera is at your service

The LG Nitro HD packs an 8MP camera with autofocus and an LED flash. Its interface is simple and intuitive.

The camera UI

The lack of a dedicated camera button is noticeable, but, like we mentioned before, it boils down to one’s personal taste. We believe that a camera this capable deserves one.

The camera features are limited to geo-tagging and touch focus along with ISO setting and preset scenes and effects. There’s panorama shot and continuous shot available as well. Digital image stabilization is also available.

The Nitro HD is a decent performer in the camera department too. The only drawback of its shots is the relatively high level of noise in the daylight shots. If you won't be pixel-peeping your photos, you would be just fine as the colors and contrast looks good in downsampled shots.

Here are a couple of shots taken in a low-light environment. The second one uses the LED flash too. It has the white balance all wrong but at least it lights the scene adequately.

Full HD video camera

With so much processing power on board, it is only natural that the LG Nitro HD can capture full HD videos.

The interface of the video recorder is no different from the one of the still camera. Along with the standard options, you can now choose to record your video without any sound.

The video camera UI

We have prepared a couple of from the camera of the LG Nitro HD. Check them out below. First up is a 1080p sample.

Then here comes a 720p video sample. We also have one for download further down.

Here goes an untouched 720p video clip.

Connectivity is fully covered

The LG Nitro HD comes with a big range of connectivity options. It has quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE for global roaming and three-band HSDPA with 21 Mbps of download and 5.76 Mbps of upload speeds .

LTE is undoubtedly the highlight of the connectivity suite of the smartphone. We’ve begin to encounter some spots throughout New York City where AT&T’s latest generation network has gone live in testing. The download speeds we saw on the device ranged between 15 and 30 Mbps – not bad for a yet to be launched network.

There’s also Bluetooth 3.0, Wi-Fi b/g/n support, DLNA, Wi-Fi Direct and Hotspot capabilities.

SmartShare is an app, which allows you control a DLNA network – you can play media from other devices (e.g. NAS) on your phone or play something from the phone on another device (e.g. DLNA-enabled TV).

The SmartShare app

The Wi-Fi Direct standard is still to roll on a mass scale but we finally see it on smartphones such as the LG Nitro HD. It’s a technology which enables devices to connect to each other without the need for a Wi-Fi hotspot. The beauty in it is that only one device has to be Wi-Fi Direct-ready in order for the magic to happen.

The web browser is nice

The Android browser is one of the best available on a mobile device – put it on a beautiful HD screen, like the Nitro’s and it is a joy to experience.

The user interface is minimalistic. What you get on the screen is an address bar on top, along with the major browsing options such as tabs, back/forwards buttons, and settings at the bottom.

The web browser is great

When switching between tabs, you have two viewing options. The first one allows you to flip through the pages like a deck of cards, while the second is much simpler – it lists them for you.

The different views of the opened web pages

The bookmark list shows a thumbnail of the bookmarked page and you get a “most visited” list in addition to the history.

Bookmarks, most visited and history tabs

The Nitro HD supports double tap zoom and pinch zoom. There’s text reflow too – it adjusts the columns of text to fit the screen width. If you’ve zoomed in using pinch zoom, you need to double tap the screen to make the browser reflow the text.

We played 720p videos directly in the browser with no hiccup. Full HD clips turned out a tad choppy, but played fine.

720p videos played smoothly in the browser