And now, we present our prime candidate for the most poorly-named phone since the Samsung Galaxy S II Epic 4G Touch (breathe): the LG Optimus Elite. This phone is now available from Virgin Mobile’s website and retails stores for $149.99, and like all Virgin Mobile (US) devices it comes sans contract. The phone is launching on Virgin three days before it was expected to hit the parent company.

So why are we down on the name? In and of itself it’s no worse than the next phone, but we feel somewhat miffed that a device that fits squarely into the low end is described as “Elite”. Not that there’s anything wrong with low-end phones – they’re a necessary part of the market, and a large part of why Android is now the dominant mobile platform on the planet. We just wish the name better reflected that.

For interested parties, the Optimus “Elite” comes with a 3.5-inch 480×320 screen, an 800mhz single-core processor with 512MB of memory and 4GB of storage space. Naturally Gingerbread is running on the software side of things, but you do get extras like Swype. Thanks to integrated NFC, Google Wallet should be available on the Elite, making it probably the cheapest non-contract way to get your contactless payment on.