Today we focus on 4G LTE-enabled smartphones and besides talking about the LG Nitro HD, we also have a look at this Samsung Galaxy S II Skyrocket. This model, along with HTC’s Vivid, are the first two 4G LTE-enabled smartphones that were launched by AT&T.

The first thing that you will notice about the Skyrocket would have to be its size as it measures 5.15 x 2.75 x 0.37 inches. The main reason why the phone is so big is due to its generous 4.5-inch Super AMOLED Plus display that has a resolution of 800 x 480 pixels and can show sharp images with vibrant colors. The handset tips the scales at 4.71 ounces so it is fairly lightweight given its size.

Located below the display are the four touch-sensitive buttons for home, menu, back and search. Samsung installed on the left spine of the Skyrocket the volume rocker, while on the other side sits the power/lock button. At the bottom is a microUSB port while on top sits the 3.5mm jack. Above the display in the upper left-hand corner is a two megapixel camera, while the 8 megapixel unit is at the back with an LED flash.

The Samsung Galaxy S II Skyrocket is running on Android 2.3.5 (Gingerbread) and on top of that is the TouchWiz 4.0 user interface. You get to use up to seven home screens, along with a handy notification pull-down menu for controlling Wi-Fi, GPS, Bluetooth and silent mode. The Samsung Live Panel widgets can be resized and when you scroll through the lists of widgets you’ll notice a more fluid motion in comparison to older models.

This is a quad-band world phone that comes with a lot of features, including a speakerphone, video calling via Qik, voice dialing, conference calling, along with text and multimedia messaging. Also on board of the Skyrocket you’ll find support for Bluetooth 3.0, GPS and 802.11a/b/g/n Wi-Fi. It has a built-in NFC chip that allows you to use the smartphone for scanning, reading and sharing RFID tags. Pretty soon you’ll be able to use this phone for making mobile payments, once Google Wallet will be available for other handsets beyond the Nexus 4G.

Under the hood of the Samsung Galaxy S II Skyrocket is a powerful Qualcomm Snapdragon processor running at 1.53 GHz which makes the user experience very pleasant, without any signs of lag when browsing through lists or switching from one app to the other.

The battery of this model is rated to last for up to 7 hours of talk time, while in standby mode it should be capable of surviving for up to 10.4 days. It has a digital SAR rating of 0.3 W/kg.