After LG has teased its new Optimus G Pro for weeks, it officially announced the phone's launch on Monday, Feb. 18, along with official specs. The company said in a release on its site that the Optimus G Pro will launch internationally, in places such as Japan and the United States, in the second quarter.
The phablet will launch in Korea on Wednesday, Feb. 20 on local carriers SK Telecom, KT and LG Uplus for $897, or 968,000 won.
The Optimus G Pro is very similar in function and form to the Galaxy Note, a phone that is large enough to act as a mini-tablet (phablet). The Optimus G Pro sports a 5.5-inch full HD (1920 x 1080) display with a screen resolution of about 400ppi. The phone is the first to use a quad-core Snapdragon 600 processor (which is more powerful and also less of a battery drain than its predecessor, the S4), and runs Android 4.1 Jelly Bean with LG's own UI.
It also has a 13-pixel on the back and a 2.1-megapixel front-facing camera and a removable 3,140mAh battery. The phone is large, but LG claims it lasts longer and charges faster than other batteries, Tech2 reports. The phone will also have LTE connectivity and plenty of space with 32GB of internal memory, and an option for upgrading with a microSD card slot.
NTT DoCoMo, a Japanese carrier, announced a smaller Optimus Pro earlier this year, confirming that the 5-inch model would be part of its spring lineup. It has the same 2GB of RAM and cameras, but it uses a 1.7GHz Snapdragon S4 rather than the 600, and has a 3,000mAh battery.
Software upgrades will allow the Optimus G Pro to record picture-in-picture video from both cameras, and offers a 3D panorama function similar to Google's Photo Sphere. We expect this will work well with its curved-glass display, which LG claims will give the phone a 2.5D effect.
At the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain later this month, we expect to see LG put this phablet on display.
