LG’s G3 no longer just a leak with an official announcement

More than a leak ahead of the official announcement, the LG G3 is now real — really real — with LG showing its competitor to the other flagships and pushing the smartphone display benchmark to new heights.

Announced at several events around the world (but not one in Australia, we’ll have our time soon enough), LG’s G3 looks to trump many of the features being put out by other smartphones in 2014.

As previously rumoured, the G3 will take advantage of a 5.5 inch Quad HD display, making it one of the highest resolution smartphones on the market, with an insanely high pixel clarity of 534 pixels per inch, 200 higher than Apple’s Retina-grade iPhone 5, 5C, and 5S smartphones.

For those keeping track at home, that’s a resolution of 2560×1440, higher than the typical 1920×1080 Full HD screens all other 2014 flagships we’ve seen thus far have included.

That level of clarity will make the pixels so hard to peep that it should produce one of the best quality pictures on the market, and with less of a bezel around the screen to boot. We’re told the screen ratio sits at around 76 percent of the phone, and the pictures indicate that it’s a very thin frame, showcasing what is amongst the closest we’ve seen for an edge to edge screen.

The design of the handset is also very different, with LG sticking with its unique rear controls found on the G2 and G Flex handsets, but evolving the design to look more modern and more like metal. Unlike what was reported yesterday, though, it doesn’t appear to have a case made of metal, with polycarbonate the main material coated instead with a “metallic skin” that is also fingerprint-proof.

Spec-wise, though, it’s all pretty much as the leak suggested, with a quad-core Snapdragon 801 processor, 2GB RAM, and 16GB of storage with room to move in a microSD slot. The specs also suggest that 32GB of storage and 3GB of RAM are possibilities too, fuelling expectations that a separate model will be released with these higher specs if needed.

Android 4.4.2 “KitKat” is also here out of the box, running a new user interface which LG says should provide a more simple interface with an adaptive keyboard to can change its height to better fit the user’s hands, a content lock for your media, and a “smart notice” feature to recommend things based on how you use your phone, such as telling you to uninstall programs you never use, calling people back who have left messages before, and even giving you relevant information in spoken audio like an assistant.

Over on the camera side of things, LG is relying on a 2.1 megapixel camera up front, but the back camera is where the real magic is.

For this one, LG is including a 13 megapixel shooter with optical image stabilisation and a technology called “Laser Auto Focus” which apparently enables better low-light auto-focus by measuring the distance between the camera and the subject using a laser.

It’s an intriguing concept, and one we’re curious to test out when the review units arrive, which should be a little before the release date in August.

Already, Telstra has mentioned that it will have the handset in stores from August, with Telstra’s Andrew Volard saying that it will be compatible with Telstra’s upcoming APT700Mhz spectrum, set to launch in 2015 with better 4G coverage.