LG’s keyboard appears to be different from this idea, though, and while we’ve complained about it in the past, and suggested not just in our writing but to LG people that it gets a company like SwiftKey into its R&D (similar to how Samsung uses it), its on-screen keyboard is only marginally improved.
There are things you can do with its on-screen keyboard that you can’t do with many others, such as change the height of the keys, turn off the numbers on the top of the keyboard, and change what symbols appear natively next to the space bar, and LG has even made it appear a touch more responsive, which is only a good thing, but we don’t feel we’re being too hard on it by saying that its word prediction just isn’t crash hot.
Seriously, it’s 2014. I shouldn’t have to press the shift key on my on-screen keyboard when I type the letter “i” by itself to see it go uppercase. I’m saying “I,” and every other phone that costs this much gets this, so why can’t LG?
That spelling prediction fails in other times, and if you gesture type — running your finger over the letters to make a word quickly — and slightly misspell something, LG will instead suggest the word that makes the least sense, instead of the one that makes the most.
Go figure. Just like last time, we’d suggest that if you find the LG on-screen keyboard equally annoying, just replace it with one of the many available from the Google Play store. You can do that on Android, and we’re thankful for it.
The battery could also be better, lasting at most a day for us, which is about average, but could be better.
If you use your phone a lot, LG’s battery should last that full day, but also may not.
Our regular phone test — which includes surfing the web, streaming music, making phone calls, texting, emailing, playing the odd small game, and a spot of social networking — helped us last a little over a day, but that seems to be the most you’ll get out of the G3’s 3000mAh battery.
Also of note is that there is no ultra low power saving mode, which is a feature both HTC and Samsung have included in their products, but is missing in action here. Maybe it’s something LG will add later on in firmware. We sure hope so, since that could make travelling with small amounts of battery life that much more useful, especially since you need to have power if you’re going through security at some airports.
The hardware is our final area of concern, most notably its construction and lack of ruggedisation, which we thought was a trend in the smartphone world.
It’s interesting to see how smartphones are evolving from a design point of view. In many ways, it feels like there are two roads being crossed, with some manufacturers seeing that highly resistant and solid materials are the way forward — like metal and glass — while flexible and cheaper to produce materials are the other way for everyone else.
In the Android smartphone world, it’s HTC and Sony that agree on high-end materials. Buy an expensive smartphone and you’ll find aluminium and glass for those two companies, and sometimes a mix of both.
But for Samsung and LG, we’re over in the plastics, with the idea being that texture or paint can emulate the experience of a high-end material just as well as using the real thing.
Sorry, but it can’t. The dimpled texture on the Galaxy S5? That’s not leather, and the metallic paint on the G3 can’t fool us either. It’s nice looking, don’t get us wrong, but we’d easily take real metal over faux metal any day of the week.
That’s not to say it’s unattractive or feels bad; it doesn’t have either of those qualities, but premium should feel premium, and it doesn’t here.
Also missing in action is water and dust proofing, which is something both Samsung and Sony seem to agree on in their phones, but that LG has missed out on.
This could be one of those things you don’t care about, and we totally get that.
You might buy a case to protect against water, and that’s totally up to you, but we can’t tell you the amount of times we’ve been taking photos while cooking on the Sony Xperia Z2 only to have it get food on it, and washing it off — running it under the tap — makes everything return to the way it was so much more easily.
We’d have liked that level of ruggedisation here, we really would have.
Conclusion
Without a doubt, this is LG’s best phone yet. Full stop.
Actually, forget the full stop, because there is more to the G3 than just being LG’s best phone, since it also gives all the other players a good run for their money, as well.
While every flagship this year bar one — Apple’s iPhone 5S, which has yet to be updated — runs on the same processor spec (the Snapdragon 801 quad-core processor) there are things in the LG G3 that set it apart from the competition, and even rise it up a notch or two.
That screen helps, since it brings the best sharpness to any mobile phone wideley available in Australia, but it’s not the only thing, and with a great looking Android overlay, a solid and fast autofocus camera, and a dose of expandable memory — something yet to appear in an LG G series phone — there’s some serious reason to move to LG here.
It’s not perfect, though. Not yet, anyway, but it is excellent, and with loads of positive features that other manufacturers haven’t thought of yet, we’d pick this over the Galaxy S5 any day. Highly recommended.
But is it the best phone? We’ll have a flagship fight in the next few days, highlighting our favourite phone out of the lot of them… stay tuned!
