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LG’s 4K smart phone upscaling revealed in video
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BARCELONA, Spain–LG is showing off a new system that transforms your smartphone into a 4K media hub.
The South Korean company is calling the new platform the “world’s first wireless Ultra HD transmission technology.” If you’ve got a game or video playing on your mobile in HD, the new platform will upscale the feed to a 4K resolution, before beaming it out wirelessly to another device.
In this situation that second device was an LG 4K television, acting as a simple monitor for the 4K feed that the phone was pumping out.
Luke Westaway/CNET
At Mobile World Congress, I played with Epic Citadel, a graphically intensive tech demo that — in this case — was running on one of LG’s Optimus G smartphones. The process of upscaling the feed to 4K is an intensive one, and the phone felt very warm when we touched it, but nevertheless the Optimus G’s quad-core processor was handling the task with relative ease.
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Games ran with a little judder, but as this technology is still months away from being released I’m prepared to withhold judgement for now. I was told the proprietary system would be cropping up in smartphones at the start of next year, or possibly the end of 2013.
It seems that tech companies want to control your living room by turning your smartphone into a portable media center.
For me, the system demonstrates how powerful smartphone processors have become in just a few short years. If the Optimus G can handle it, I’ve no doubt that other mobiles emerging in the next year or two will be equally capable.
