EOUL: LG Electronics says its new smartphone with a full high-definition screen will go on sale in South Korea this week and hit shelves in Japan in April.

LG said on Monday the Optimus G Pro smartphone features a 5.5-inch screen that packs over 2 million pixels, or twice as many as smartphones with HD screens.

The South Korean company, Sony Corp., HTC Corp. and other phone manufacturers are trying to make high-resolution screens a key feature in their new smartphones this year.

Full HD screens are more common in televisions but smartphone makers began to embrace them this year amid cutthroat competition.

LG said its new Android-powered phone sports other upgrades including a camera that can shoot full HD videos and photographs.

The new model adds the largest display yet seen on an LG smartphone - a 5.5in 1920x1080-pixel Full HD IPS panel - along with an enhanced 13MP rear camera for Full HD shooting.

The 4G LTE phone, which runs Android 4.1.2 Jelly Bean on a 1.7GHz Quad-Core Qualcomm Snapdragon 600 processor,  also has what’s claimed to be the largest battery capacity in its class, at 3140mAh, and this battery is both user-swappable and able to be charged wirelessly.

Onboard memory runs to 2GB of RAM and 32GB of storage, with the ability to add up to 32GB using a microSD card.

In addition to that 13MP rear camera, complete with LED flash, there’s also a 2.1MP front camera, with features including Dual Recording - allowing picture-in-picture effects by recording from both cameras simultaneously - and Virtual Reality Panorama to allow 360-degree views to be taken.

An LG spokesman told the launch event that he expected the Optimus G to take off faster than other smartphones available in the Korean market.

Meanwhile head of LG’s phone division Dr Jong-seok Park pledged that the company will continue to expand its position in the premium LTE smartphone segment.

It’s all part of LG’s strategy to regain market share in what is sometimes referred to as the ‘second tier’ of phone manufacturers - i.e. those behind Samsung and Apple.

Once the world’s third-biggest maker of phones, it’s currently in fifth position, behind Samsung, Nokia, Apple and ZTE.

The Optimus G Pro follows on the success of the standard Optimus G, already a strong seller in the markets where it’s available, and recently confirmed to be on the way to the UK.

It looks like LG needs to concentrate its efforts on premium smartphones such as this, with reports suggesting its other major technology leader, OLED TV, is failing to capture the imagination of the Korean public.