Design is also very different from other phones, and that’s because LG has crafted a modular phone.
Along the left edge, you’ll find a button that — when pressed — allows the bottom of the phone to drop out and be replaced with other sections.
That means the design of the LG G5 isn’t totally set in stone, so while it’s a nice and simple looking device out of the box, if you throw in a different accessory, that nice and simple design can change.
Screen
Before we get stuck into the ways the design can change, though, we feel obligated to touch upon the screen.
Seriously, if there’s one thing LG knows, it’s screens. In the past few years, the company has really proved that it has what it takes to lead this category, releasing some impressive Ultra HD panels in its TVs, the world’s biggest supply of OLED TV panels, and making the first Quad HD screen for a mobile phone.
And in the G5, we’re getting a third generation Quad HD screen, providing a 2560×1440 panel and a pixel clarity of 554 pixels per inch, meaning razor sharp details. Good luck peeping pixels here, people.
As expected, brightness is pretty top notch here, with excellent viewing angles from all sides, though the G5 doesn’t quite have the same sense of dynamism we’ve seen on competing handsets.
There’s no doubting that it’s a pretty screen, and definitely very easy on the eyes, but it doesn’t quite take on the competition as much as LG might think.
Performance
Aside for a new screen, there’s also a new processor under the hood, with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 820 here, a quad-core processor clocked at 2.2GHz that despite having only four cores, handles itself in early tests far better than other processors with more cores used last year.
The reliance on that chip isn’t new to the industry, and LG is following a theme. HTC used it this year, and Samsung also did for its overseas Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge models, though Australia received the Samsung-made Exynos processor for its S7 phones.
That makes the G5 the second phone in Australia officially to arrive with the Snapdragon 820 chip, a processor that can certainly handle its own, especially when paired with the right components.
Fortunately for LG, that is exactly what the company has done, bringing in 4GB RAM and 32GB storage, a combination that from what we’ve seen in the past tends to work well.
Synthetic benchmarks are very good, even if they don’t quite put it on par with what Samsung’s Exynos-based phones are doing locally, but you shouldn’t have any issues regardless.
In fact jumping from app to app and from menu screen to menu screen, the flow of this phone is practically seamless, which is great news for you.
It’s hard to pick up on a skerrick of lag, if one exists, and LG has done a pretty good job of optimising the OS, even if Android isn’t the way we normally like it. More on that in a moment.
For now, we’re finishing up our tally on performance by looking at the 4G speeds, which can support speeds of up to 300Mbps, putting it in Category 6.
LG hasn’t yet confirmed exactly which category this sits in, and we’ve heard variants of the phone exist in both Category 6 (300Mbps down, 50Mbps up) and Category 9 (450Mbps down, 50Mbps up), but regardless of what speed you think it can reach, it is fast.
Tested in Sydney’s CBD on Telstra’s 4GX network, we found speeds hitting as high as 200Mbps down, practically blowing our eyelids off and making it one of the fastest tests of any smartphone we’ve ever done. As if we needed a way to churn through our data more quickly, because testing download speeds in this way will definitely do it.
In-use
Outside of performance, there’s use, and this one is a little different from what we expected.
We said we’d get to this momentarily, and here it is, with the bad news first: Android on the LG G5 doesn’t look as much like Android in its current incarnation.
In the past, LG has offered a pretty lightly skinned interpretation of Google’s Android OS, with most of the tweaks there for user customisation.
Care to change the soft buttons at the bottom of the screen? You could do it. Keen to change icons on an individual app basis? You could do that, too.
Theming? No worries, because just as HTC and Samsung have only cottoned onto the fact, it’s been with LG phones for a while.
In the LG G5, the same is true except the design of Android has changed: there’s no app drawer.
Remember the dots that you used to press on to bring up the app menu that you press on practically every Android phone outside of those from Oppo or Huawei? They’re gone.
Instead, the app drawer and widgetised home screens are now one long running flow, with menu-to-menu delivery of app shortcuts on screen-to-screen swiping, similar to what you might see on the Apple iPhone, or the Oppo and Huawei phones we mentioned previously.
We’re not sure why on this, to be honest. It’s a bizarre jump for LG, which has predominantly kept things pretty close to what Google has offered, and while it might change, Google’s Android 6.0 “Marshmallow” does not look like what LG’s G5 is showing it, at the moment.
There have been rumblings that it might by Android N, but we’ll wait until Google announces that.
And that means the LG G5 isn’t Android the way most people familiar with an LG phone — or most other Android phones, for that matter — experience it.
You can get used to it, mind you, because it’s more or less the seamless scrolling menu system we’ve seen time and time again, but you shouldn’t necessarily have to, and there should be an option to go back.
There is, of course, provided you download a secondary launcher on the Google Play Store, but this isn’t really the same, and we’re still a little surprised by the sudden app-menu-less change LG has taken.
A few bugs also pop up here and there, such as with notification sounds stopping the music instead of fading it down and playing the alert on top, or even the physical shortcut for the camera — double press the volume down button — not working when headphones are plugged in, understandably so, but bugs are to be expected.
Fortunately, not all is problematic. Some of the changes are actually great.
