Though their footprint in the United States isn’t as large as they’d like, LG remains a major player in the worldwide smartphone game. case in point: the company announced today that its current flagship, the Optimus LTE, has sold over a million phones in all its various territories. LG’s home country of South Korea accounts for a whopping 600,000 phones all by itself, with the rest being split between the United States, United Kingdom, United States and Canada.

Since LG is counting US sales, we assume that it is including slight variations, such as AT&T’s LG Nitro HD and Bell’s Optimus Eye. The phone recently came to Verizon as the “Spectrum by LG” – you can check out our hands-on look at the hardware here. While these variants have slight stylistic differences, the core hardware remains the same, with an impressive 720p IPS display at a size of 4.5 inches, a 1.5Ghz dual-core processor and of course an LTE radio. The phone currently runs Android 2.3 Gingerbread, but LG and at least one of its carrier partners has committed to releasing an Ice Cream Sandwich update.

LG may have tipped its hand already for the Optimus LTE successor: a render/press photo of the “LG X3” made its way onto the Internet last week. Rumored specifications include a quad-core Tegra 3 processor and a 4.7-inch display, with Ice Cream Sandwich running at launch. The phone is expected to be seen in February at Mobile World Congress, if it’s the Real McCoy. “X3″ may be a codename – it’s hard to imagine LG dropping the Optimus branding if it’s doing so well.

[device id=2112] [device id=2064] [via TechRadar]