Fine display, good camera, fast processor, expandable memory
Battery life not as good as it could be
LG may not produce as many phones as some of its rivals, but recently it seems to have been concentrating on quality rather than quality. As the Korean company's new hero handset, the G3 brings a combination of good looks and (mostly) impressive specs at a fairly reasonable price.
Chassis & screen
If style matters (and it does) then the G3 is a very important phone. The casing appears to be brushed aluminium throughout, but it's been kept slim at 9mm depth and lightweight at 149g. At least, that's how it appears. On closer inspection however, the rear casing is actually plastic, but with a thin metal film covering. So it's lightweight (and incidentally can handle wireless charging), without surrendering any of its classy good looks, and it feels nicely warm to the touch too.
That's not the only thing about the phone's style that's distinctive though. LG's so-far unique approach to hard buttons that we've seen previously is back, with the controls on the rear of the phone rather than the sides. So beneath the camera lens you get a rather subtle power/sleep button, with volume buttons above and below it. They're slightly recessed, so you're unlikely to press them by accident, and with a large phone like this, they're generally easier to reach than they would be on the sides or top.
All well and good, but the 3.5mm mini jack input for headphones is on the bottom of the phone, which feels a little odd.
The 5.5-inch touchscreen treads that fine line between phone and phablet but the handset's thinness just about drops it into the phone camp. There's none of the curvy Plastic OLED shenanigans of the tech-trialling G Flex we saw earlier this year and instead we have a more conventional IPS LCD screen.
Conventional technology it may be, but the resolution is one of the best we've seen, with a higher-than-HD 2,560x1,440 pixels.
That's an impressive 534ppi -- way beyond the iPhone 5s's 326ppi -- and it looks ravishing, with realistic colours and deep, contrasting blacks. It's nicely sensitive too, easily distinguishing between our brushes, taps and presses.
Software & processor
The G3 is running the latest Android 4.4 KitKat but as usual LG has given it a bit of a tweak. This version looks a little flatter and more simplistic than standard Android. It doesn't appear to have lost anything though, just simplified the look, which does it no harm at all. Another of LG's tweaks means you don't actually need the power button on the back to switch it on. A double tap on the screen has the same effect. You can do the same trick to power down too, but only from the lock screen.
Like the Samsung Galaxy S5, the G3 comes with its own fitness tracker, LG Health. There's no heart rate sensor but you can measure your steps and activities as well as calculating calories burned. The Smart Notice feature isn't quite as useful. It's a tab that hangs beneath and gives you updates based on the time of day and your location. So you get prompted with weather updates and friends' birthdays -- kind of like you do anyway. The Smart Keyboard is a clever feature for larger phones that allows you to adjust the number of keys displayed -- so you can choose between functionality and a larger view of the page you're working on.
The quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon is clocked at 2.46GHz and backed by 2GB RAM. Those are pretty big numbers and it easily delivered, whipping through the apps like only the most powerful processors can, without a hint of lag. HD games like Real Racing 3 have never looked better, or performed more smoothly.
Our AnTuTu benchmark test gave it a score of 36,193, which puts it in front of the HTC One (M8), Sony Xperia Z2 and Samsung Galaxy S5. In fact, the only phone we've seen with a (slightly) higher score is the new OnePlus One. The 3,000mAh battery stood up pretty well for the most part, delivering a day's heavy use fairly easily, but we'd expected a bit more from a battery of that size.
Photography
The 13-megapixel camera comes with a bright, dual LED flash and a range of lighting and mode options. Not as many as we've seen on some of LG's previous efforts though -- they seem to have slimmed down the offerings to concentrate on the most popular.
Like most higher-end cameras on phones, the G3's snapper has autofocus. Unlike most however, this one is laser-guided, and a small transmitter next to the lens fires an invisible laser beam to calculate the distance between the camera and its subject. This supposedly has advantages for accuracy and for speed, and although the autofocus did seem to snap into place fairly quickly, we did notice that you can also catch it out if you're quick on the draw.
Picture quality is pretty impressive too, with rich, realistic colours and plenty of detail.
On the front is a 2.1-megapixel camera for selfies and video calls. It doesn't have the impressive pixel counts of the Huawei Ascend P7 (8 megapixels) or the OnePlus One (5 megapixels) but it has a couple of handy tricks up its sleeve. For one thing it recognises when you put a hand in front of your face and clench it into a fist -- that's the signal to take the pic -- or you can tap the screen to start a countdown. Nice to see more manufacturers beginning to take the art of the selfie seriously. There's 16GB of memory on board, plus you can add up to 128GB via microSD card -- not always the case with some of the higher-end handsets.
Conclusion
The LG G3 deserves its place at the big table. It has a stonking screen, a terrifically powerful processor and it manages the tricky compromise between style and functionality with aplomb. It's able to do all this for a fairly reasonable price too, but with the likes of the OnePlus One or Huawei Ascend P7 snapping at its heels, the days of the premium-priced phone could well be numbered.
Software: Android 4.4 KitKat
Processor: Quad-core 2.46GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon
Memory slot: Yes
Display: 5.5in LCD, 2560x1440 pixels, 534ppi
Connectivity: Wi-Fi a/b/g/n/ac, Bluetooth 4.0
Ports: microUSB, 3.5mm headphone jack
Camera: 13 megapixel with autofocus, dual LED flash; 2.1 megapixel front-facing camera
Video playback: MP4, DviX/XviD, H.264, H.263, WMV
Audio playback: MP3, WAV, FLAC, eAAC+, AC3, WMA
Radio: Yes
Battery: 3000mAh
Size: 146x75x9mm
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
