Leading “Uncarrier”, Death Star conqueror, international roaming champion, cheap streaming facilitator and perennial prankster T-Mobile no longer wants folks traveling stateside for brief stints to have to jump through Sprint’s hoops to ...
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LG changed its game plan with the G5, emphasizing design practicality and innovation over aesthetics and finishing touches. This is best represented in the LG G5’s Magic Slot that makes this a partially modular Android smartphone by expanding it functionality with external accessories. Compared with the HTC 10, and new Samsung S7 handsets, the LG G5 is not the most attractive device. But that Magic Slot makes it one of the most interesting handsets on the market.
The LG G5 has a dated look, but modular design.
Thankfully, LG didn’t ditch everything from its previous G smartphones, including the G4’s excellent rear camera. The G5 actually has two of them: the same 16-megapixel camera we loved on the V10 model, along with a wide-angle 8-megapixel camera that’s just a notch below in terms of photo quality.
As if that weren’t enough, this device also sports the latest Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 chipset, 4GB of RAM, Android OS 6.0.1 (Marshmallow) and a replaceable 2800 mAh battery.
LG is betting that features and specs matter more than looks when it comes to the G5. But is it any good?
We have never written this about a G-series smartphone, but the G5, at least a first glance, is bland. It has average dimensions and weight for a 5.3-inch phone (5.88 x 2.91 x 0.30 inches, 5.61 ounces), a metal unibody, and regular button placement (an unwelcome departure from the LG trademark of back-mounted buttons).
The LG G5 has a Gorilla Glass 4 front.
The G5’s front surface is covered with Gorilla Glass 4, from the top all the way down to the Magic Slot. The glass is slightly rounded near the upper side edges, which is unique only to the G5 (rounded glass on the edges is common and sometimes called “2.5D”). The curvature serves no purpose apart from aesthetic concerns. Although the relatively sharp front and side edges suggest multiple pieces, the entire body is crafted out of a single piece of metal (apart from the removable module, of course). This makes the LG G5 feel like a credible device. This is the only unibody smartphone with an interchangeable battery.
In addition to the LG logo on the removable module, the front side also includes the front camera, speaker, notification LEDs, and several sensors. The back side includes the dual rear camera, which protrudes from the back surface into a bump that also holds the LED flash and “laser” autofocus sensor (infrared to be precise). The fingerprint reader is situated under the camera, which doubles as the power button.
The phone’s lower side includes the USB-C slot, primary microphone and speaker perforations, while the upper houses the secondary microphone for ambient noise reduction, the 3.5mm audio jack, and infrared transmitter. The right side holds the nanoSIM and microSD card slot, while the volume control keys are situated on the left side. The Magic Slot release key also sits here, and it works immaculately. When pressed, the module pops out slightly, enabling the user to easily pull it off. Reattaching it only requires a simple press until it audibly clicks. The Magic Slot is just as well-built as the phone around it.
The LG G5 has a large camera bump.
A single USB Type-C input handles charging.
With its 5.3-inch IPS QHD display (1440 x 2560 pixels), the LG G5 has a high density of 554 pixels per inch. Image sharpness is exquisite and the contrast is praise worthy. Looking just at the pure black and white tones, the screen matches AMOLEDs found on other devices.
Too bad it has poor maximum brightness. Perhaps this is why LG included an “Assertive Display” algorithm intended for viewing the device in direct sunlight. It’s an adaptive display technology found on other devices with similar chipsets. It works well enough, and it keeps glare from overwhelming the G5 display.
We’ll praise the G5 for color interpretation. Colors are exceptionally well saturated and accurately interpreted, albeit with a slight emphasis on pastel tones. Most people will find this pleasant for everyday use, but those who prefer more intense color and surreal image quality will be disappointed that LG did not enable the option to manually adjust the color settings. That aside, the G5’s colors are some of the best on the market, if not the best.
Like the V10, the LG G5 has the Always On option. Unlike the V10, which uses its additional display panel, the G5 actively displays the time and date smack in the middle of the display when the phone is on stand-by. Just like the case was with previous iterations of the G series, a double tap awakens the phone.
The display isn’t entirely praiseworthy, though. The display bezel is very large and the G5 does not have physical Android keys to occupy the space (they are on-screen capacitive keys). This is the tradeoff for a modular design.
The LG G5 has Qualcomm’s latest Snapdragon 820 chipset with a quad-core Kyro processor (2 x 2.15 GHz and 2 x 1.6 GHz), Adreno 530 graphics and 4 GB of RAM. This combination offers exceptional fluidity during use and make it the fastest phone — or at least one of the three fastest phones — on the market, as of this writing. In testing, the device did not overheat with long use, even when playing graphically demanding games and video content, over both 4G and Wi-Fi.
On the Geekbench 3 benchmark, the LG G5 scored 2322 on the single-core test and 5354 on the multi-core test. This is in line with the other early 2016 Android flagships.
Overall, the LG G5 is runs well and should prove reliable, which allay fears of G Flex and G4 owners struck with the infamous bootloop that bricked the smartphones.
The LG G5 ships with a 2800mAh battery. The Camera Plus module (which includes a photo grip) includes a 4000mAh battery. Nevertheless, the basic battery is good enough, besting the V10 and G4 output by 10%. We were able to stream full HD video for 8 hours and 5 minutes on a single charge, which matches most of the flagships from 2015. By comparison, the Samsung Galaxy S7 edge lasted 10 hours and 48 minutes, which is outstanding.
The LG G5 supports Qualcomm’s Quick Charge 3.0 protocol, which replenished the battery up to 80 percent in 30 minutes in our tests. Of course, you can always squeeze out more juice by turning off the Always On display feature. LG officially claims Always On uses less than 1 percent of battery capacity per hour, but we showed about a 15% difference during our informal battery tests.
LG G5 dual cameras
If the modular design doesn’t pull you into the G5, the camera will. Two cameras, in fact. One is the same 16-megapixel we loved in the LG V10, which comes with F/1-8 and a field of view at 75 degrees. The second camera has 8 megapixels, F/2.4, but an exceptionally wide angle with a field of view at 135 degrees. LG has managed to secure very clever and creative collaboration between the two cameras with its decent camera software. The smartphone switches between the two cameras depending on the zoom level, and also allows users to manually choose certain shots.
This combo enables various effects. Pop-out Picture enables simultaneous shooting of both rear cameras with one image representing the background and the other the foreground. An effect is then applied to the background (blur, fisheye, vignette), and effects can be combined. Multi-View makes it possible for both, or even all three cameras, to simultaneously record videos or shoot photographs. It is also possible to choose a layout on which the images are then arranged.
Both back-facing cameras are equipped with a laser autofocus (infrared, to be precise) and 3-axis optical stabilization, while the 16-megapixel camera offers fantastic results. Image detail is abundant, even in poor lighting. The cameras offer highly precise exposure, color saturation, and excellent sharpness. It’s certainly one of the best smartphone cameras on the market, perhaps only second to the Samsung Galaxy S7 and S7 edge.
The 8-megapixel camera does not offer the same level of detail, or poor lighting performance. But it’s very practical for daily wide-angle recordings. The captured angle width is very impressive, perfect for panoramas. And users will need to make sure that the shot does not include their fingers as well.
Video recordings taken with the rear cameras are some of the best ones taken with a phone. Full HD and 4K are available at 30fps, with a high level of visible details. The same goes for the 8-megapixel selfie camera with f/2.0, which is among the top front-facing cameras on the market and can record Full HD video clips at 30fps.
8-megapixel wide-angle lens
16-megapixel, regular lens
Pop Out sample
The LG G5 is one of the most powerful smartphones on the market. Its camera and innovative modular design are appealing, as is its powerful and stable chipset.
It’s not the most attractive phone in the world, though. In fact, it looks like a flagship from years past, when style was not a primary concern. But some may see this as a geekish touch worthy of its innovative feature set.
The only remaining question is whether LG continues to push the modular design with new and exciting accessories. As it stands, the LG G5 is an excellent smartphone. With new accessories expanding functionality, it will be that much better.
Pros:
Cons:
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Sony’s long-struggling mobile arm and US carriers have never been particularly close, and it’s hard to tell if that’s because Xperia phones aren’t popular enough stateside, or if perhaps they failed to catch on all this time precisely due to Sprint and AT&T’s indifference, as well as T-Mobile and Verizon’s blunders.Either ...
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I was one of the people who stood in line during a snowstorm in New York to get the original Surface Pro went it went on sale February 9, 2013. I quickly started criticizing its lack of proper Wacom WinTAB drivers that would enable pressure sensitive stylus use in professional graphics programs like Photoshop and Painter. Microsoft learned their lesson and launched the Surface Pro 2 with practically perfect stability and great hardware improvements to the battery life for example as well as full support for the stylus. The Surface Pro 3 built upon that success with a larger screen, new ...
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As part of Lenovo’s ongoing restructuring and reorganization efforts, the ZUK sub-brand is deemed the company’s salvation in China, where Vibes and Lemons have recently lost steam and the Motorola name means a ...
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Given the company’s willingness to reveal precious inside information on the OnePlus 3 ahead of time, we must admit we were surprised to see so many conflicting tipster-based reports regarding screen size and resolution, battery capacity or RAM configurations.But as we near D-day, pretty much all our lingering questions ...
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After sending a number of mixed messages regarding the future of its post-Z Xperia smartphone family, and fumbling with the E5 announcement last week, Sony decided to finally lay all the entry-level specifications out in the open.While far from impressive by low-cost standards in markets ...
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There's every chance that smartphones of the future will have folding screens. The tech has been under development for a long time and we're already seeing curved displays on the likes of the Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge, so it seems like it will only be a matter of time, but when it does arrive we hope it looks nothing like it does in this Samsung patent.
Unearthed by Patently Mobile, the design shows a phone which when unfolded looks like any other Samsung handset, complete with rounded corners, an oblong home button and a camera jutting out the back.
But there's a fold in the middle, which allows you to fold the screen in on itself and turn it into a shorter, chunkier shape. This could make it easier to fit in pockets, but all you're really trading is length for thickness,
And unlike some folding concepts, which always give you access to the screen and just make it bigger or smaller depending on whether it's folded, this Samsung one cuts the screen off altogether when it's closed, leaving you with a useless and likely very expensive lump.
In another bizarre twist the charging port lives on the joint, so you can only charge the phone when it's folded shut, meaning you can't both charge the device and use it at the same time.
It reminds us of a recent Oppo flip phone prototype, except it's even worse, as that you can at least charge while using. We're all for folding phones and even the return of flip phones, but not like this.
While it’s certainly (the good kind of) hard to choose an ultra-high-end Android phone from an established brand nowadays, after Samsung, LG and HTC all outdid themselves, it’s arguably even trickier to shop for so-called “affordable flagships” in crowded markets like China or India.The latter just got more crazy-packed with sub-Rs. 15,000 powerhouses, as local startup Yu Televentures challenges ...
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Last week, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella – only the third person to have the job in over 40 years – announced in a press release that the company planned to "streamline [its] smartphone hardware business".
The streamlining will cut 1,850 jobs, the majority of which are in Finland, and cost $950 million (around £650 million, or AU$1.3 billion), around $200 million (around £140 million, or AU$280 million) of which will be in staff severance packages. The rest, it can be assumed, will be getting rid of unsold stock, buying tissues into which executives will weep, and so on.
The move follows the announcement that Microsoft was selling its 'dumb' phone business to a subsidiary of Foxconn for $350 million (around £240 million, or AU$480 million), which was seen as the first – or last, depending on how you look at it – sign that Microsoft was exiting the phone business altogether.
Of course, Microsoft has not explicitly expressed it like that. "We are focusing our phone efforts where we have differentiation," wrote Nadella in the press release. Microsoft will now cater to "enterprises that value security, manageability and our Continuum capability, and consumers who value the same."
In an email to staff, published by Recode, Terry Myerson, the man in charge of Windows and Devices, wrote that the team had "done hard work and had great ideas, but have not always had the alignment needed across the company to make an impact."
This argument is, as pointed out by Ben Thompson, an independent analyst, rather silly – "clueless," as Thompson puts it – because it largely misses the point that Microsoft could have made a decent run at the mobile world and it was "alignment" across the company, rather than macro-level events, which halted progress.
However, the fact Microsoft is now cutting off the limb that was its phone business is a good sign and reinforces the idea, which is held by many long-term observers, that Nadella is doing a good job and the changes he is making – freeing the Office, Azure, and Windows teams, along with focusing on getting software out, rather than tying it to Windows, and so on – are working.
The legacy of Nokia, which is no longer a Microsoft-controlled brand, has been largely wasted by Microsoft after it was acquired for $7.2 billion (around £4.9 billion, or AU$10 billion), a deal which was quickly identified as Steve Ballmer's last mistake as CEO before handing over the reins to Nadella.
Ever since the day Nadella became CEO, he has been undoing the wrongs of the deal, which blew a sizeable hole in the company's coffers and saddled it with a failing business that would, over the next few years, see phone market share drop to under 1%, which is classified as a rounding error by some firms.
Lumia devices never sold well, with consecutive sales decreases of 46% and then 49% in the past two quarters, and the 'dumb' phone business was being swallowed by cheap-as-chips Android phones, some of which retailed for under $25 in key markets like India.
All in all, the deal for Nokia made no sense, but it had to be kept because, well, it cost over $7 billion and would have been an embarrassing thing to walk away from before now, when the game is well and truly over. When Steve Ballmer laughed at the iPhone in 2007, it should have been taken as a sign of how wrong this deal would go.
Nadella, to his credit, has done almost everything in his power to right this wrong, however, and the Microsoft that exists today is one that has learnt from the mistakes of the past and, bar the massive financial burden, is ready to move on.
Instead of trying to sell phones, Microsoft can now focus on distributing productivity software – namely Office – to as many people as possible, some of whom will pay monthly, as well as getting Windows 10 onto a billion devices in the next few years.
The deal that Microsoft has been giving to Windows users – a free upgrade to Windows 10 from 7, 8, or 8.1 – ends in just under two months, and the company has announced that this really is it, the last chance for upgraders, despite concerns that this may not be the best way to on-board users. Windows 10 currently has 300 million users, according to Microsoft, so it's unclear how an extra 700 million will be added if they have to pay, especially over the given timescale.
Nadella makes a valid point that there are a group of users who like Windows-based phones still – businesses – and selling to them makes more sense than competing against Apple, Samsung, and so on.
Features like Continuum, which turns a smartphone into a fully-fledged PC with an optional display dock accessory, have potential and leverage the assets Microsoft has, like an integrated operating system across devices, as well as beating competitors to the punch.
Businesses that are currently experimenting with BYOD are finding that it's costly, both in terms of time and money. Supporting a myriad of operating systems and devices, all with oddities and unique features, is tough and having a single solution – like a Microsoft phone running Windows 10 – certainly has appeal.
This market, however, should be seen as more of a consolation prize for Microsoft than anything worthy of credit, because it won't be anywhere near as profitable as the consumer electronics market, which was what Lumia devices were aimed at.
The future of Microsoft rests on the shoulders of Windows 10, Office, Azure (which recently went cross-platform, thanks to Nadella), and moonshot initiatives like HoloLens. Nadella, so far, has encouraged all of these and, more importantly, has enabled each team to do their best work across allplatforms, not just Windows.
The shackles of being a Windows-only company have been thrown off by Nadella and the results speak for themselves. Going forward, Microsoft is in a much better position to do good – and dumping what remained of the phone business is another positive step forward.
MediaTek caught a lot of Computex 2016 attendees off guard and made plenty of headlines yesterday with the announcement of its own groundbreaking fast-charging solution for Android smartphones, but if you were expecting Qualcomm to unveil something similarly innovative at the Taipei expo, we’re sorry to disappoint.Then again, it’s clearly far too early for Quick Charge 3.0 or
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While they say conventional tablets, without the ability to seamlessly morph into something else, are pretty much dead, a handful of hopeful companies continue to see a future for jumbo-sized cost-conscious Androids, particularly 7 and 8-inchers.A future very similar to the present, unfortunately, at least as far as LG is concerned, with the “new” G Pad III 8.0 greatly resembling last year’s Korea-launched G Pad II 8.3 and ...
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Microsoft has been sticking strictly to the five-inch range for its phones lately. Why not go big or go home?Actually, that’s not a good question to ask Microsoft right about now …Well, Spanish manufacturer Funker thinks it can pull it off. It released the
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Increasingly, our phones are the center of our various data strategies. For a lot of our messages and notifications, we turn first to our phones. Increasingly, we push the limits on what our phones can do. Document management, multimedia, content creation. Mobile devices are moving from being support gadgets to front line devices. If phones are becoming primary, might it make sense to improve the connection standard we use to move information on and off of our phones?
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Watch today’s Pocketnow Daily as we talk about OnePlus and the company’s new “The Lab” project for the OnePlus 3. Then we discuss the recently leaked renders of a possible Surface Phone. Then we talk about some of the recent rumors that claim that the next iPhone will go for 32GB of storage to start. Asus then delights with its new lineup of tablets, the Transformer 3 and Transformer 3 Pro. We end today’s show talking about the new Asus Zenfone 3, Zenfone 3 Deluxe, and Zenfone 3 Ultra.All this and more after the break.Stories:–
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