LG G5
A modular phone that’s better as a camera than a modular proof of concept.
As a reputed smartphone manufacturer, one thing you absolutely need to keep in mind while designing a new flagship smartphone is something very trivial — give your fans what they want (and by extension, depart from those things that didn’t work the last time around).
Samsung suffered because of this when they ditched the removable battery and a dedicated microSD card slot on last year’s Galaxy S6. LG too, had its attempts at faux leather mocked by some. The world is not a very fabric-on-my-phone place right now. Metal is in, else composites.
The LG G4 suffered too, for its poor battery life and extremely buggy software, which impacted the worst-possible way — the camera experience. It was so bad, that the camera often “went hunting” (i.e. kept looking for something to auto-focus on) for so long, that you could pretty much watch a T20 match and come back to find the G4 still scratching it’s head! Okay, it wasn’t quite that bad, but if you can find a better analogy, inbox me and I’ll contemplate updating this post).
Well, back to the G5 — it’s really, really good to see LG coming up with trumps with their latest flagship.
Released in Feb 2016 and expected to be made available for sale in the coming few weeks, the LG G5 represents a massive change in LG’s design ethos.
It features a full-metal body and ditches the mostly-unloved leather back that didn’t really click for LG all of last year. The screen’s straight too, no longer concave-curved. And front-on it looks absolutely smashing (Oops! That’s not what we meant!). To prevent that “smashing”, the LG G5 comes with the now-mandatory Corning Gorilla Glass 4.
We get ahead of ourselves. Let’s start from the top.
The LG G5 features a eye-bewildering 554 ppi, 5.3 inch IPS LCD QHD display. Thats not all… the G5 features a new ‘Always On’ display which is very similar to something Samsung also showed off at MWC this year — a display that never sleeps.
Why? Well, checking time, for one. You mayn’t yet know this, but a smartphone is most used for exactly that! On the LG G5, if you want to glance at the time/date, all you have to do is glance. No more fiddling with buttons — it’ll be right there on your device’s display, anytime. Guess what, no gestures required either (like those on the Moto X Style and the X Play).
LG says that the battery only drains an extra 0.8% an hour with this screen format.
Predictably on a flagship, the G5 comes packed with Google’s latest offering- Android 6.0.1 Marshmallow and LG’s very own Optimus UX 5.0 UI. LG’s user interface gets a splash of paint, but it’s not a total overhaul. Icons appear to be a little more rounded and the quick settings menu isn’t so drab. A major change is the removal of the app drawer. This means all of your apps will now be displayed on the home screen itself, something similar to what you are used to seeing on an iPhone, only a little more cluttered.
Under the hood, this smartphone is powered by a quad-core Snapdragon 820 chipset and Adreno 530 dedicated graphics with 4 GB of RAM. You get 32 GB of internal memory with the option of expanding it upto 200 GB using the dedicated microSD card slot.
At the back is an impressive piece of tech in terms of the rear camera. What you see is a dual rear camera setup — it uses both, a 16 megapixel and an 8 megapixel camera at the back to increase the field of view of the camera. In fact, this duo-camera setup is able to capture everything your eyes can see, and more! Additionally the rear camera can record 2160p videos with ease.
At the front is an 8 megapixel shooter with an f/2.0 aperture and 1080p video recording capabilities.
Other features include: a USB type-C port for charging, USB OTG capabilities, a highly accurate fingerprint sensor and fast battery charging (83% in 30 min).
This device is available in the four colours — Silver, Titan, Gold and Pink.
Originally published at chip-monks.com.
