Everything You Need To Know About The LG G5. Well, Almost.

Great internals and for once, great modularity too.

LG rolled out its LG G5 at the Mobile World Congress and efver since, the phone has been creating quite a stir with its all-metal body and the add-ons that accompany it.

While the phone will hit market shelves in the U.S. only by early April and will be available in India much later — maybe in the last quarter of the year, it’s already generated a lot of conversation.

The price for this power packed phone is yet speculative as they haven’t been confirmed by any reliable source as yet.

The smartphone boasts of the all-new metal design with a slightly smaller screen — a 5.3 inch IPS Quantum version enabling the phone fit for single-hand usage. The screen is vivid, brighter than others and even comes with Day Light Mode (which adjusts the screen brightness as per ambient light present at all times).

With Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 (Quad 2.1 GHz) processor, it’s easy to jump between apps and screens. For the selfie-obsessed users, the phone comes with an 8 megapixel front camera and a dual rear camera setup with an 8 megapixel camera sensor on one side of the LED flash and a 16 megapixel sensor on the other.
The secondary 8 megapixel camera has a Wide Angle Lens, which has coverage of about 135 degrees. This helps LG get an upper hand, as other smartphones usually provide 75–90 degrees coverage and the inclusion of two parallel lenses, each with its own sensor, improves low light performance, depth of field (blurring out the background in a portrait) and auto focus.

At the Mobile World Congress the LG G5 didn’t debut alone but was accompanied by a suite of cohorts called LG Friends. Well these loyal and much talked about “friends” are part of LG’s revolutionary modular design and are clearly the X-factor of the flagship.

Thanks to LG’s proprietary modular design, the battery can be easily separated from the device and the slide out battery can be exchanged with a fresh one, anytime, anywhere, with considerable ease.

Other add on modules are also available, which when plugged into the LG G5 device have the capability to transform the device into a DSLR style camera, a mobile virtual reality viewer and more:

• LG Cam Plus is a camera module that adds two stage shutter buttons for camera operations.
• The Hi-Fi Plus module, developed in collaboration with Bang & Olufsen, is a portable Hi-Fi DAC which can be used as a standalone portable DAC or with the G5 to enable 32-bit audio playback. Yes, you heard that right.

Interestingly, the “friends” aren’t restricted to just the above three modules. Other, very cool devices like LG 360 VR, LG 360 CAM, LG Rolling Bot, LG Smart Controller and LG Friends Manager have also been lined up by the South Korean conglomerate to be released soon.

LG Friends Manager is part of the Android 6.0 Marshmallow based LG UX 5.0 custom UI, which enables the users to manage and access all the Friends devices like LG Cam plus at one place. LG UX 5.0 is infused with new home screen with the app drawer, upgraded LG Health app, Always-On display, Smart Doctor app to manage device’s health, enhanced world clock, File Manager app, Quick Help app to find answers to any questions about the G5, LG Backup, and accurate fingerprint recognition for enhanced security.

There are speculations that LG might launch another modular type smartphone called LG G5 ‘Lite’. The handset has passed TENNA, the Chinese telecommunications certification authority, revealing partial specifications and its design.

The LG G5 Lite like its senior (LG G5) boasts the same 5.3-inch QHD (1440x2560 pixel) resolution display, along with the 32 GB inbuilt storage and also comes with the same 16 megapixel + 8 megapixel rear camera setup, however, the processor has been downgraded from Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 to Snapdragon 652 and the RAM reduced from 4 GB to 3 GB.

But the LG G5 has already had one round of controversy — sparked by a claim made by YouTuber, JerryRigEverything, who posted a video of an LG G5 teardown where he took apart the smartphone and scraped the back of the phone with a knife.
Jerry was of the view that the uni-body of the phone has way more plastic than metal. This news started making rounds on the Internet, so much so that in order to clear the air, LG was forced to declare a public statement explaining that the uni-body casing is composed of a “special aluminum alloy” called LM201 is a die-cast metal and was developed by LG in collaboration with the Korea Institute of Industrial Technology.
Once LG is done with the process of casting the die, the antenna slit is applied directly to the aluminum casing followed by a coating of primer. This primer is then covered in a pigment containing tiny metal particles, which means it’s a metal device with a generous layering of paint.

This minor controversy however gets subsumed under the incredibly amazing add on modules called “friends” and the UX 5.0 UI system.

Summarising, the LG G5 is definitely the best that LG has so far produced, and it’s DNA indicates that LG’s thinking innovatively, and trying to add stuff that may actually be useful to different subsets of customers. I believe LG is onto good things already, and can really build on the LG G5' impressive platform.

Originally published at Chip-Monks.