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The iPhone 5 has taken the field, and already rivals are queuing up in the tunnel to emerge into the daylight and give Apple’s latest effort a hard-fought match. The next rival to schedule an announcement is LG, perhaps revealing the Optimus G — and on the same day as an HTC launch.
LG and chipmaker Qualcomm have invited press to the announcement of a new phone in New York next week. The invitation reads, “LG and Qualcomm invite you to live without boundaries” on 19 September — the same day that HTC unveils its first Windows Phone 8 phone.
The fact that LG is dropping its new phone on the same day as HTC’s Windows Phones might suggest that LG also has a Windows Phone up its sleeve — but we suspect that it’ll be the Optimus G that’s unwrapped.
The LG invitation reveals that the new phone will be powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon processor, and the Optimus G packs a beastly Snapdragon S4 Pro chip clocked at 1.5GHz.
The quad-core phone sorts a 4.7-inch screen with a pixel count of 320 pixels per inch, which is pretty close to the 326ppi count of the iPhone’s retina display. It also features a 13-megapixel camera, which can be programmed to shoot a picture when you say a specific word — appropriately named Cheese Mode.
The Optimus G is also a 4G phone, which would up until now have precluded it from arriving in the UK. But the impending arrival of the EE 4G network means LTE phones could make an appearance on this side of the pond.
LG gets its press conference in earlier than HTC. Later that day HTC will reveal its first phones to be powered by Microsoft’s new Windows Phone 8 software. The first Windows Phone 8 phones announced are the Samsung Ativ S, Nokia Lumia 920 and Nokia Lumia 820, but it remains to be seen which will be the first Windows Phones to actually hit shops.
Windows Phone 8 handsets are set to go on sale in November, shortly after the 26 October launch of the Windows 8 desktop software.
Can LG pull something out of the hat to challenge the iPhone, Samsung Galaxy S3 and HTC One X? Tell me your thoughts in the comments or on our Facebook page.
