AT&T LG G2 review
The Optimus tag has been replaced with cutting-edge hardware and a bold button layout
LG has been on a tear as of late, releasing phones that tick all the marks for hardware aficionados, while paring back their user interface slowly but surely. The G2 is the culmination of these efforts. It's currently the hardware king with the Snapdragon S800 CPU (though that will be changing soon enough) combined with a big screen and everything else Internet phone fans have a hankering for. But we've seen enough to know that it takes more than hardware to make a great phone.
The software is equally important. This is an area where LG has historically struggled, often adding too much of the wrong stuff to Android and delivering a product that nobody ever asked for. While we admire any company who thinks outside the box, everyone here has been waiting for LG to get it just right. A perfect phone is surely something that can never be, but the G2 comes close. Read on and see where the G2 excels, where it fails, and why the former outweighs the latter.
Hardware
If you're in the camp that says hardware is all that matters, you've found your dream phone. It's well built for the most part, has deliciously thin bezels astride the 5.2-inch screen, and will run most anything you throw at it with nary a flinch or stutter. It's stylish and thin, has a great curved shape, and ergonomically it feels very nice in your hand. It manages the size as well as the user can expect, and operation with one hand is certainly possible with minor adjustments.
THE DISPLAY IS WHAT WE SPEND ALL OF OUR TIME LOOKING AT, AND IS THE MOST IMPORTANT SPEC TO GET RIGHT
What we didn't like (you knew this was coming) is the extra-glossy materials the G2 is built out of. It suffers from the same problem Samsung's Galaxy S4 does — it looks like it's cheaply made. Clearly it's not, and using it for more than a few minutes will affirm this. It's a solid device. But it looks like a cheap mass-market product. We understand that smartphones are a mass-market product, but we've seen devices use plastic in ways that look and feel good and wish LG would follow suit. If you were expecting a textured, premium feel as we've seen some from of LG's past products like the Optimus 2X, you'll be disappointed.
Don't let this stop you from buying or enjoying the G2. Slap a case on it if it bothers you as much as it does me. I'm not a case user usually, but the G2 is one of those phones that would force me to use one.
What's on the outside
We have to start with the display. It's a gorgeous 5.2-inch "Tru-HD" IPS LCD, checking in with a 1080 x 1920 resolution that gives us approximately 442 pixels displayed per inch. The quality, clarity and color reproduction rivals the celebrated HTC One display in every use case. The viewing angles are excellent, and you will appreciate the time and money LG has put into their LCD technology every time you watch a video or look at a picture. The display is what we spend all of our time looking at, and to me is the most important spec to get right. LG has done more than get it right, and you really need to see it to understand just how damn good it is.
Sharing the front of the phone with the gorgeous screen are the usual array of sensors, a 2.1MP camera, the earpiece speaker and a multi-color notification LED. While not nearly as thin as the side bezels, the top and bottom bezels are small and symmetrical. At the very bottom of the face of the phone you'll find an LG logo that we wish had been left out for appearances sake.
The sides of the phone house none of the standard controls as those are around the back — and we'll be talking about that, shortly — but there are a few things to take notice of. At the top of the phone you'll find one of the microphones, on the left side you'll find the micro SIM card tray, and on the bottom there rests a headphone jack (the 3.5mm standard), a microUSB charging and data port, and symmetrical speaker grills. Under those grills, there is a loudspeaker on the right and the main microphone on the left. The edges are all gently curved, which makes for a nice, seamless feel while holding and using the G2.
YOU WILL EITHER LOVE THE BUTTONS OR HATE THEM, BUT EITHER WAY YOU WILL BE ABLE TO ADJUST
Now we get to the back. Likely as a way to keep the bezels so impossibly thin, LG has moved the volume controls and the power button to the rear of the device. You will either love this or hate it, but either way you will be able to adjust to them unless you have very short fingers. On the AT&T version, the controls are nice and wide, and having the power switch made from a different material than the volume rocker allows you to operate everything by feel rather than turning the phone around to look where your fingers are. The controls work exactly as expected, they are just placed on the rear rather than on the sides where normal, sane people expect them to be. Surrounding the power button is a flashing ring that you would think acts as a notification light, but I'm not seeing this behavior. It does flash when the screen is turned on or off, though.
Also around back, and equally important, is the excellent 13MP camera and LED flash. We'll talk more about these further down the page.
What's on the inside
THE FEATURES CAN BE USED WITHOUT AFFECTING THE PERFORMANCE IN WAYS THAT MAKE YOU WANT TO TURN THEM OFF
Under the great screen is where the beast lives. Of course, I'm talking about the Qualcomm Snapdragon S800 power plant. Consisting of a quad-core array of Krait 400 cores, an Adreno 330 GPU, an extra fast 2MB L2 cache on a 28nm die means it's simply the best ARMv7 system-on-chip available. The version in the G2 is clocked at 2.26Ghz, and it chews through even poorly-coded software with ease. While I'm sure LG spent time optimizing their code to run as best as it can on the G2, the UI is heavy and full of features. With them all enabled, there is nary a stutter or complaint when using the phone. This is impressive, as things like Q-Slide apps, motion gestures and LG's Slide Aside features are heavy and processor intensive. You may or may not find these features useful, but it's nice to know they can be used without affecting the performance of the device in ways that makes you want to turn them off.
I think we have finally reached the point where the hardware is so damn good that we can throw any software on it and get great results. This makes me excited for the future, because a slim, less feature-rich (but highly optimized) operating system running on similar hardware should blow our hair back. I'll put it bluntly — the G2 is as fast and lag free, while running software that's feature-rich and heavy, as the Nexus 4 or Nexus 7 is running bare-bones Android. That's something we haven't been able to say before, and we're glad to see it.
The full specs
| Operating System |
|
| Display |
|
| Processor |
|
| Memory |
|
| Camera |
|
| Battery |
|
| Connectivity |
|
| Miscellaneous |
|
| Dimensions |
More Read LG |
No comments:
Post a Comment