FIVE MONTHS WITH THE LG G4

AN EDITORIAL AND REVIEW

It’s not much to look at. I would wager that if I handed an LG G4 to virtually any onlooker on the street and told them that “this phone is a serious contender to be Android’s phone of the year,” the most common response I would receive is, “you mean this year?”

In a world of unibody aluminum flagship phones, features such as removable batteries, expandable microSD storage, and replaceable back covers are often nostalgically reminisced about amongst Android enthusiasts. That being said, thinness, glass, and metal reign supreme over swappable batteries and memory cards in most of today’s top-tier phones. This is where the G4 is a departure from the offerings of Samsung and Apple.

LOOK AND FEEL

Upon grasping the device, the curve of the body becomes abundantly obvious. While not as drastic as the G4’s cousin the ‘Flex,’ the curve is prominent enough to give the G4 a much needed touch of distinctiveness and style.

With its slightly larger screen, at 5.5”, the G4 firmly sits in the ‘phablet’ category. For myself, single handed use can be done with relative ease, but it would be understandable if a smaller-handed individual would have difficulty operating this phone with one hand.

Volume rocker and power button placement matches the G4’s predecessors with their location on the back of the phone, below the camera sensor. This leaves the edges of the G4 unobstructed and smooth, sans a headphone jack and micro-USB port on the bottom of the phone. This does give the G4 a cleaner look, although the chrome finish on the plastic edges leaves a desire for an actual metal frame, much in the style of the Moto X.

Instead of a more conventional, sealed back, we are presented with a removable back cover that secures the battery, microSD card, and micro-SIM. In order to combat the ‘less-than-premium’ feel of the phone, LG offers the back cover in a variety of different coloured leather, as well as a plastic ‘diamondback’ grey or white option. The leather options have white stitching accents running in a vertical line down the center of the cover, which add a certain handmade flare.

At the time of this review, I have only witnessed the grey ‘diamondback’ and black leather cover. To which, I can attest that my preference is for the black leather, but it is not without its follies. The leather adds a more refined look to the G4, but the material itself looks and feels ‘plastered’ on, as there is no continuity between the smooth plastic edges of the device and the more tactile fabric. For that matter, the fabric itself is also of wavering quality. In short, the leather is hard. It is hard enough that upon feeling the leather back, questions come to mind on whether or not this is legitimate leather or a fairly convincing plastic molding. LG claims that it is “genuine full grain leather,” but at least for the black variant, I might have to take that claim on faith.

SCREEN AND SOFTWARE

The 2560×1440 LCD “IPS Quantum Display” is easily one of the better features of this smartphone. It is not without its problems, but on the whole, the display is crisp, bright, and can be viewed from a wide range of angles without issue. The major downfall of the display is its abhorrent colour temperature. Generally, you will find whites and light greys have been cooled down to possess a light blueish hue. While this has not absolutely destroyed the colour accuracy of the display, opening DNG format photos into RAW Decoder or Adobe Photoshop Lightroom on the G4 would be an exercise in futility as whatever colour corrections you make will look starkly different on a colour accurate display.

The software experience, while nothing special, is functional and adds some cosmetic fun with wobbly widgets and stretching effects. LG UX 4.0 is not a huge departure from the stock android experience, but the added settings menus can be convoluted and are not too pleasant to look at with a somewhat tacky skin. On a positive note, the app switching screen gives the user an option for ‘dual windows,’ which is a beneficial addition, especially if you enjoy simultaneously viewing email attachments while having your inbox open. LG has also incorporated ‘Smart Bulletin’ into their default launcher. Smart Bulletin essentially is LG’s attempt at emulating the ‘Google Now’ page found in Google’s ‘Google Now Launcher.’ As expected, it posts information on the news, your emails, calendar appointments; in essence, it pulls data gathered from some of LG’s various apps in order to give you information you may or may not be interested in. Admittedly, after a week or two of running LG’s launcher, I did switch to Google’s ‘Google Now Launcher.’ While LG’s launcher is by no means terrible, the Google Now Launcher offers a much simpler and speedier experience, and the metrics that are gathered for the ‘Google Now’ page are much superior to LG’s ‘Smart Bulletin.’

PERFORMANCE AND BATTERY LIFE

In the wake of the overheating issues to plague LG’s own ‘Flex 2’ and HTC’s ‘One M9,’ I am thankful that LG opted to use Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 808 instead of the 810 in the G4. In general, the device is snappy and responsive. I have been able to throw virtually any app at the G4 and it seems to plow through whatever is in its path. GPU performance has also been excellent, whether you are just playing something simple like Threes! or something more graphically intensive like Modern Combat, the load times have been more than acceptable and actual gaming performance has been lag-free. Sometimes the back of the phone gets a little heated in the corner beside the laser sensor, but the temperature never gets to the point of being uncomfortable. The only gripe I have is that every so often there is a pause or stutter while switching apps. To which, considering the G4 has 3Gb of RAM and should be able to handle a significant load of apps, I am inclined believe the stuttering is a software issue as opposed to hardware.

For me, the 3000 mAh battery is more than adequate. I am a moderate to heavy user, and at most I run the battery down to 30 percent after a day of texting, gaming, and browsing various websites. This is with my screen brightness typically set to 75 percent, and with LG’s “Game optimizer” on. The only exception to this superb battery life has been when I have been limited to 2G networks, in remote areas. Although this is hardly an issue limited to the G4, but while tied to 2G cellular networks the battery life of the phone is quite literally cut in half. That being said, unless you are in a rural or mountainous area, this deficiency will not apply to you.

CAMERA

Truly, the pinnacle feature of the G4 is the camera. There are very few smartphone cameras that contend with what LG has put into the G4. With assistance from the laser focus and color spectrum sensors, virtually every picture is brilliant in detail and color accuracy. If your goal is simply to point the camera at an object and obtain a beautiful photo, then the automatic camera settings will leave you satisfied about 95% of the time.

However, it would almost be criminal to always leave the camera on ‘automatic’ when LG’s camera app has given the user the ability to manually adjust the exposure, aperture, ISO, white balance, and focal levels to a practically infinite degree. As an added bonus, the camera also allows users to save their photos in DNG format for additional exposure and colour correcting. Yet, the claim that this phone could operate as a replacement for your DSLR is contrived at best, and delusional at worst. The explicitly fine control that the camera app offers combined with the astounding detail that the f/1.8 aperture lens grants you, might give you the closest experience to using a smartphone as a DSLR, but I would nary see many professional photographers ditching their Canon EOS 7D and telephoto lenses for the LG G4.

The 8MP front facing camera also gives a solid performance. While nowhere near as detailed as the rear camera, pictures are still fairly sharp and more than adequate for shooting the occasional selfie or video chat over Skype. In certain conditions the white balance seems to over correct to a cooler white, however, this might simply be a result of the G4’s display emitting light on to subjects in the camera’s view.

Though the laser-assisted focus does provide accurate results, it seems the camera spends a significant amount of time scanning and adjusting before finally settling on a focal distance. However, this problem pales in comparison to the main pitfall of this camera: video. I am not entirely sure if this is a result of the OIS implementation or if the video compression is causing significant quality loss, but the sheer amount of artifacting is terribly distracting. Whether you are shooting a video in a bright sunny park, or in a dim mellow restaurant, virtually any kind of movement will cause tears and noise in the image. To compliment this, the sound quality is at least of equal detriment. Audio comes across as muddy and poorly defined, often leaving the foreground and background audio fighting for dominance in the video.

SUBSTANCE OR STYLE

The LG G4 has been my ‘daily driver’ since June 2015. I am well passed the ‘honeymoon’ phase and the last five months have me thinking about who this phone is really for. So, where does the G4 fit in the marketplace? I hate using old adages, but the G4 is the epitome of the “style versus substance” debate, and I firmly hold that this phone is for people who make substance their style.

My father has a vast collection of vinyl LP’s from his youth. Irrevocably, whenever we throw one of them on the turntable someone makes a comment in regards to ‘how much better’ a vinyl record sounds over a CD, mp3, etc.. Maybe it is just nostalgia driving their sentiments towards vinyl, or maybe there is some truth that through the hissing and crackling of the old tube amp and open back speakers that there is a certain organic warmth that is lost in the cold 1’s and 0’s of digital media. The caveat here is that after that proclamation of vinyl over digital, I always am set to ask if they would go back to listening to vinyl. To which, that answer is almost always a resounding, “no.” For prudence and practicality’s sake, digital media just offers so much more convenience, even if it is a little ‘colder’ and ‘sterile.’ This notion is what the G4 is all about.

When you watch a video on a Galaxy S6 the colours pop and flourish. They draw you in with a sense of awe; it is visually exciting to see images on a bright, over saturated colour pallet. When you watch a video on the G4, it is still bright, but the colours are muted and cold in comparison. There is no effort to give those feelings of warmth and excitement. This makes the phone seem less like a medium for media consumption and enjoyment, and more like it is a tool. A tool that can be used to digest media, but ultimately designed with functionality and productivity in mind. The thing is, I like that.

I admit, when someone pulls out their S6 Edge and I see that sleek aluminum frame and curved glass blasting out candy coloured light from an AMOLED screen at what must be at least a million lumens, driven by a powerhouse processor that is the Exynos 7420, I cannot help but think ‘that just looks fun.’ Then I turn back to my G4, and it’s not a toy. It’s pragmatic. It’s prudent. It practically begs you to be productive with it. There is no stop in workflow. A full charge is only a 30-second battery swap away. There is no limit to your storage, more gigabytes are only a microSD card away. The dual window function lets me open up my Gmail app in the top half of the screen, and then open up any PDF files, worksheets, or documents in the bottom half while I read or reply to my emails. The G4 is my laptop for when I cannot use my laptop. (In fact, I even edited a significant portion of this review on my G4.)

Now, that isn’t to say that the G4 is incapable of being a fun device. What is to be said is that the G4 is simply about getting things done. Sometimes playing is one of those things. So play your favourite game, browse Reddit, watch a movie – the G4 may not have mastered those tasks like the offerings from Samsung and Apple, but it is more than capable of doing them and doing them well. This is generally the motif for the device. It might not be the best in any particular category, but it is always capable of doing whatever task you need it to do. I know I said I hate using old adages, but the G4 really is the “Jack of all trades, master of none, though oftentimes better than master of one.”*

*Especially when it’s this year’s HTC One.