LG’s recent smartphone offerings have been pretty solid, with last year’s G2 being a pretty solid phone. However, the company has really upped the stakes with the G3, which is a premium phone both inside and out.
Users will find plenty of horsepower under the hood, with the G3 sporting a 2.5 Snapdragon 801 processor with 3GB of RAM, 32GB of built-in storage, a 13-megapixel rear-facing camera, and its biggest draw – the QuadHD screen. So let’s get right to that QHD screen. The 5.5-inch screen boasts a display of 2,560 x 1,440 with 534ppi, which looks quite incredible even at first glance. Text is fantastically easy to read while images look sharp. LG also pre-loaded some videos and photos that are there to showcase what a QHD display can do and those look amazing. I also appreciate the display’s vivid colors and even blacks and whites. Viewing angles are pretty good too though not as good as I’ve seen on a few other devices. I will say however, that although icons look as crisp as I’ve seen them, and the pre-loaded content is quite a site, normal, everyday use won’t result in images that are as stunning. The issue isn’t with the phone itself, but rather with content. It’s sort of like looking at a 4K (UHD) TV right now. It can pump out some gorgeous visuals, but there isn’t much content available to be displayed. Hopefully more and more apps will begin to take advantage of the higher resolution but for now that’s just not the case.
The G3 is also free of any physical buttons on the front and back again, as the power button is found directly on the back of the phone, along with a volume rocker. While the phone is still plastic, the back and front have a metallic paintjob that at least gives the G3 the appearance of having its housing made of premium materials. I also found the phone to be pretty comfortable to hold despite its 5.5-inch screen, with a slightly curved back and tapered edges.
As for the rest of the phone’s technical features, you’ll find 2G, 3G and LTE radios, along with Bluetooth 4.0, a 3,000mAh removable battery, a microSD card slot, NFC, an IR blaster and wireless charging capabilities. The front camera is also of the 2-megapixel variety, which produces some decent photos, but is relatively “meh” in terms of overall performance. LG gave it bigger pixels in order to let more natural light come in, specifically for low-light conditions and though the images do look a little clearer than the average front-facing camera, the images look a tad soft, almost fake, while using the “flash” function is a bad idea, since your face will look lit up while everything is dark. Then there’s the 13-megapixel rear-facing camera, which includes an infrared laser focus system. The feature, according to LG allows the camera to focus in 220ms, while competing phones like the HTC One M8 and Samsung Galaxy S5 do that in 300ms. I’d say in practice however, I didn’t’ really notice much of a difference in focus speed compared to my M8. Taking pictures with it, I found that the camera performed well in low light conditions. There was little noise and colors came out pretty accurately, though when shooting photos with the sun near or in the shot, colors were a tad washed out. Nighttime shooting was solid and the optical image stabilizer kept things in focus even when my hand moved around a little bit.
The phone has two pretty neat features as well, one of them being Knock Code. What it is, is a feature that lets users tap on the screen in a pattern as an alternative to a security PIN to unlock the screen. What I like about it is that you can knock anywhere on the screen and the phone is able to divide the screen in a way that even if you’re not knocking in specific/evened out areas on the screen, it will still recognize the section you meant to knock. The other cool feature that LG likes to talk about is the new keyboard. You can change its height if you like, though I didn’t really find a reason to, though it does learn your typing habits to auto-correct when it knows you screwed up. Honestly though, I kept finding myself just going back to Swiftkey for my keyboard use.
So how about battery life? I was concerned that with the kind of display it’s lighting up, the phone would have average performance, but I was happy to see that the G3 could go a whole day without needing to be charged. The final interesting feature that the phone has is LG Health, which is a health-tracking app, as you would have likely guessed. After entering some information about myself, I came to see that the phone does a good job of counting steps, and I’ve compared it to my Fitbit Flex to see them come up with near identical steps. You can also enter your runs, hikes and runs, while the app record a map route using GPS so that you can see how you did and where. Other information such as calories burned and such are also present and while you can certainly get more out of a dedicated app with its own hardware, it’s pretty good for a free feature.
All in all, I was pretty happy with the LG G3’s performance and design. I feel like LG is making some big strides in the high-end smartphone spectrum and can honestly say that it deserves to be considered for those looking into the Galaxies, and iPhones of the world for their next device.
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