A couple of weeks ago LG challenged me to dump my beloved iPhone 5C for their new flagship G3 handset for two weeks to see whether their new phone could make running the blog easier, and a bit more enjoyable.
The G3’s biggest talking point is obviously its screen, the G3’s screen measures 5.5-inches, and while that might sound huge, LG has actually managed to shrink the bezel to the point that the phone’s footprint is actually the same as a 5-inch phone. The G3’s screen is touting a best-in-class, and quite ridiculous, 2560×1440 resolution, which, to put into context is the same as my 27-inch iMac, on a phone that weigh less than 150grams.
“it’s like looking through a window on the palm of your hand”.
Now as you can imagine a screen like this drinks the phone’s battery like you wouldn’t believe, especially when you ramp up the brightness. But when you set it to full it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say it’s like looking through a window on the palm of your hand. It’s so crisp and so vibrant that going back to my trusty 32GB 5C was akin to going back to a black and white TV. It made the whole experience of trawling through emails and submissions a slightly more enjoyable experience too. But the screen really comes into its own for stuff like games, streaming video and eBooks thanks to the screen’s incredible viewing angles, accurate colour reproduction and stunning contrast ratios.
The increased screen size obviously makes everyday tasks like editing posts on-the-go really intuitive compared to an iPhone – even better is the fact that you can use the phone’s space key as a clever slider to slide across words and letters making fixing simple typos or errors much simpler. In fact the way the LG G3 handles typing is a light years ahead of the iPhone especially as it handles corrections and alternative words in a much better way.
The camera is the phone’s next big talking point. The G3 comes with a 13-megapixel camera that incorporates a “laser autofocus” system, the first on any phone apparently. Interestingly the tech actually came from LG’s research on their now defunct Roboking robotic vacuum cleaner. Now it’s not going to tidy your room but it will help you take better selfies. The camera utilises a cone-shaped infrared beam to map the depth and position of objects, allowing you to simply pick an object to focus on and snap. Combine that with tradition autofocus tech and face detection capabilities – and you’ve got the fastest autofocus time of any smartphone, just 276 milliseconds.
Running a modified version of Android 4.4 KitKat, LG thankfully only adds a couple of subtle changes to the base software, with the phone coming with just three pre-installed apps. LG clearly can make very good phones, their partnership alongside Google for the Nexus 4 and Nexus 5 are both clear examples of their abilities. So it’s good to see them bring some of that simplicity in design to their own flagship handset. Everywhere you go you see this design philosophy, even more so with the camera software which has seen its UI trimmed and streamlined without losing any of its core functionality. This simplicity in design carries over to the phone’s button placement; there are no buttons on the side or the front of the phone at all. What you do get though is three buttons below the phone’s camera on the rear removable cover.
With a removable battery, a 1440p screen and the ability to upgrade the phone’s memory to 128GB, the LG G3 is as future-proof as you can possibly get. Compared to the current iPhone 5C and 5S, the G3’s specs are light years ahead and we wouldn’t be surprise if they were still ahead of iPhone 6, which is expected sometime later this year. Sure the G3 it might not complete with Apple’s build quality or looks but it’s what’s on the inside that counts and the G3 has almost everything you could ever want from a phone.
HBF Rating 5/5
