Pantech Vega Racer 2 official: 4.8-inch 720p LCD, ceramic coating and LTE, launching in Korea next week

Tomorrow, Samsung will reveal the next Galaxy smartphone, and we’ll be covering it live... but Pantech is sneaking an announcement of a high-profile smartphone just under the wire. The Pantech Vega Racer 2 is real, and it will indeed come with Android 4.0 on a relatively huge 4.8-inch, 1280 x 720 resolution screen, when it launches on all three major Korean cellular carriers next week.

While we’ve seen a lot of handset manufacturers competing on processing power or thinness as of late, Pantech’s taking a slightly different tack: the company says it’s achieved a blend of power and longevity by pairing a 2,020mAh battery to Qualcomm’s increasingly popular Snapdragon S4 MSM8960 processor, which it claims can manage an estimated 9.5 hours of talk time and 245 hours of standby while still providing speedy LTE cellular connectivity.

That’s not to say that the phone is fat, though. At 9.35mm thick, it’s only a tad stockier than the Droid RAZR Maxx, and it weighs less at 133g (about 4.7 ounces). The Vega Racer 2 also touts voice recognition for a variety of tasks, including taking photos. If you were hoping for an all-ceramic case or a top-shelf Super AMOLED Plus display, though, you might be disappointed with the result: we’re looking at a ceramic coating here, and Pantech’s not talking about the specific display technology right now. Also, there’s no word on international availability, or price.

Hyunhu Jang contributed to this report.