If you think that the smartphones nowadays have more and more room for growth in an exponentially growing market, LG has just proven you correct. At the CES2012 in Las Vegas, they have unveiled their newest handset, LG Spectrum, which is a spectacular device, unlike any other handsets from LG before. We have been keeping a tight tab on CES, and we are delighted already on several products we have laid our hands on; LG Spectrum is certainly one of them.
The second largest laptop manufacturer of the world, Lenovo has brought down a handset into smartphone arena at the CES, and this might just be the right decision to expand their dominance further. As novice as they are in the smartphone market, we cannot deny that they have high-end technological expertise gained through the mobile computing platforms they deliver. The debut product Lenovo S2 is also in an admirable position among the new handsets to be released in the hyper month of January. Here, we will compare LG Spectrum against Lenovo S2 smartphone. The specialty in this comparison is that we are going to compare two newly released products in this review.
LG Spectrum
LG is a mature vendor in the mobile phone arena with a lot of experience in identifying the trends of the market and going along with them to maximize their penetration. The buzz words in the industry nowadays are 4G connectivity, true HD screen panels, high end cameras with 1080p HD capturing etc. Although it’s not a surprise, we are glad to say that LG has captured all of these under the hood of LG Spectrum.
We’ll start the comparison by mentioning that LG Spectrum is not a GSM device; thus, it would only work in CDMA network, which makes it different from all the GSM devices, and we’d have preferred if LG released a more popular GSM version of this handset too. Nonetheless, it comes with the blazing fast LTE 700 connectivity for internet browsing. The Spectrum features 1.5GHz Scorpion S3 dual core processor on top of Qualcomm Snapdragon chipset and Adreno 220 GPU. This combination is boosted by 1GB RAM and controlled by Android OS v2.3 Gingerbread with the promise to provide an upgrade to v4.0 IceCreamSandwich. It has 4.5 inches of gigantic HD-IPS LCD capacitive touchscreen, featuring true HD resolution of 720 x 1280 pixels and a pixel density of 326ppi. In layman’s terms, what this means is that, you get crystal clear images in extreme conditions like direct sunlight, wonderful color reproduction, crisp and clear text down to the smallest details, utilizing less amounts of power. The availability of high speed internet connection would mean seamless browsing through your mails, light browsing and social networks. The ultimate power of the processor enables you to multi task in such a way that you can still browse, play games and enjoy media content while you’re on a voice call.
LG has included 8MP camera in Spectrum, which has autofocus and LED flash with geo tagging enabled. It can capture 1080p HD videos @ 30 frames per second with LED video light included, and the 1.3MP front camera certainly is good for video conferences. It also has Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n, and Spectrum can also act as a Wi-fi hotspot, which would be an ideal way for the user to share his super-fast LTE connectivity with friends easily. The built in DLNA functionality means that Spectrum can wirelessly stream rich media content to smart TVs. A special feature of LG spectrum is that it comes with ESPN’s ScoreCenter app that enables you to enjoy sports in HD on your screen.
LG spectrum is somewhat big, obviously because of the gigantic screen, but it’s somewhat heftier as well scoring a weight of 141.5g and a thickness of 10.4mm. It has an expensive and elegant look with pleasing ergonomics. We gathered that the 1830mAh battery would work for 8 hours after full charge, which is admirable for a smartphone with a gigantic screen like this.
Lenovo S2
The Lenovo S2 lies somewhere in the in between of a high end smartphone at an economical investment range. It comes with 1.4GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon single core processor with either 512MB or 1GB of RAM depending on the set up you choose. That is to say, Lenovo S2 will come either in 512MB RAM with 8GB of internal storage, or 1GB RAM with 16GB of internal storage. We are hoping that it would have the ability to expand the memory using a microSD card for 16GB storage just won’t suffice nowadays. It has 3.8 inch screen with 800 x 480 pixels resolution, which is acceptable. We would have been rather happy to hear S2 doing a better resolution than this though. The apparent setback in Lenovo S2 is that it does not run on latest Android OS v 4.0 IceCreamSandwich. Lenovo has decided to port its product with Android OS v2.3 Gingerbread, and they have not announced about an upgrade to ICS either. We are guessing that there will be an upgrade to ICS because the specs of this handset can handle ICS very well.
Lenovo S2 comes with 8MP camera at the rear with some advanced features and VGA camera for the use of video conferencing. We suspect geo tagging will be enabled with the use of Assisted GPS and Lenovo S2 would come with usual aspects on an Android smartphone. The network connectivity is still unknown, although, we can be certain for it to have HSDPA connectivity. Our guess is that Lenovo won’t try to introduce a 4G handset in Lenovo S2 debut run. It also has the ability to sync the media content automatically with cloud infrastructure and among cross devices, which is great. The improved UI with a clean layout included in Lenovo S2 seems to be an attraction, as well. As per Lenovo, this handset boasts of unique kernel level security that protects your data and prevents phishing and SMS trafficking. It is indeed a welcome addition and one that would grab the attention of seekers out here in Las Vegas at CES.
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A Brief Comparison of LG Spectrum vs Lenovo S2 • While LG Spectrum comes with 1.5GHz dual core Scorpion processor with 1GB of RAM, Lenovo S2 comes with 1.4GHz single core Scorpion processor with 512MB or 1GB of RAM. • LG Spectrum has 4.5 inches HD-IPS LCD Capacitive touchscreen featuring a resolution of 720 x 1280 pixels, while Lenovo S2 has 3.8 inches touchscreen featuring 800 x 480 pixels of resolution. • LG Spectrum is available as a CDMA device while Lenovo S2 is available as a GSM device. • LG Spectrum comes with blazing fast LTE 700 connectivity while Lenovo S2 might only feature HSDPA connectivity. • LG Spectrum features 8MP camera with very advanced features while Lenovo S2 features 8MP camera with some common features. • LG Spectrum does not guarantee kernel level security while Lenovo S2 guarantees kernel level security.
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Conclusion
Our conclusion is that LG Spectrum can be crowned in the smartphone market with its specifications. It’s really rare that we find such a combination of performance, ergonomics and seamless clarity in a handheld device; thus, it would directly go to the hall of fame for mobile devices. On the other hand, Lenovo S2 is not such a high-end device. It is more targeted at the mid-range market, and when compared to that market, Lenovo S2 is also an Ace. Therefore, it would only be fair to conclude when we have more information about the prices and the exact specs of these two mobile devices. In the meantime, you can safely digest the fact that LG Spectrum is indeed better in performance than Lenovo S2, but yet to be defined in the market in terms of an investment.