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LG G5 Unveiled: 5.3" QHD Display, Snapdragon 820, Modular Magic Slot Expansion (hothardware.com)
MojoKid writes: Rather than just bring another smartphone update with the typical yearly iterative tweaks, the folks at LG have really done something transformative with their next generation G5 flagship smartphone. The aluminum unibody construction of the G5 brings with it a 5.3-inch QHD display, powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 processor that is paired with 4GB of RAM. 32GB of internal storage is standard but there is a microSD card slot to allow for up to 2TB of expanded storage. On the rear, you'll find a fingerprint scanner and two cameras, a standard 16MP sensor and a 135-degree wide angle 8MP sensor. In addition, LG has included a USB-C port and removable 2800mAh battery. That's all rather routine stuff; what's truly innovative about the G5 is its Magic Slot, which brings a new modular twist to the Android platform. Pressing a key on the side of the G5 will eject its bottom section, which will also allow you to remove the battery. Then you can proceed to attach new modules, like the LG Cam Plus. The LG Cam Plus adds a camera grip to your G5 along with a dedicated camera button and a jog wheel for zooming. The module also boosts the battery capacity from 2800mAh to 4000mAh. The second module is the LG Hi-Plus, which brings with it an external 32-bit DAC and amplifier. This particular module was developed in conjunction with Bang and Olufsen and comes with a pair of H3 headphones that support native (Direct Stream Digital) DSD playback.
This is far from routine and deserves special mention.
With root access, along with Linux Deploy and SSH/VNC client apps installed, I get my money's worth.
I buy retro phones with HW keyboards. They feel more like a very portable linux pc that way. In the linux chroot environment, I can run any linux usermode app I want, run any system daemon I want, and muck about with custom mounted filesystems. (even mounting image files on the sdcard into useful places that are visible from android.)
I bought my HTC Doubleshot second hand off ebay, and put a custom built cyanogenmod on it with some additional kernel modules (like binfmtmisc, zram, nfs, and pals) to make the chrooted linux more useful.
I have gotten my money's worth.
Review I wrote over on XDA after I had had the phone for a couple of weeks. Since then I have stuck a Qi sticker in it so I have wireless charging and after a 8 months the leather cover is now polished to a dark brown all the way round the edge.
Morning All,
Thought I would share my thoughts on the LG G4 after owning it for a month. I use the in a business environment where I will spend 2-4 hours per day talking on it, so my review will come from that perspective more that from a gaming perspective. It was this difference in usage pattern that I thought may interest people.
Currently I have made no real changes to the setup of the device, it is still running stock everything and is a Telstra H815K model.
The look and feel of the device is excellent and gives a real feel of quality. I went for the brown leather option and to date it is completely un-marked by any signs of wear. When I first picked up the phone I was really surprised by how light it was. It is not a small device but it feels very very light and initially it feels like you are holding a toy. I think if you were to hold another phone at the same time you could be forgiven for saying it felt cheap due to the lightness but away from other phones you soon forget that comparison and just appreciate the fact it doesn't weigh a tonne. And really, no one says a Macbook Air feels cheap because it's light.
The leather back is a really really nice differential and I have had people ask what the case was and where they could get something similar. At only a month in I would expect a traditional back to still be pristine, but I had some concerns over the durability of the leather. Suffice to say that it looks exactly the same today as the day I got it. I will say though that my impressions of the black leather back were no where near as positive, as it had the look and feel of the fake leather patterning you often see on the inside of car doors.
Physical layout of the phone works well and it sits well in my hand. The narrow bezel around the screen means the phone is physically small compared to others with the same viewing area, with the draw back that sometimes my pudgy palm can just cross over into the sensor area of the screen. This does only happen when I am playing a game in portrait mode with two hands though so the impacts are limited.
I only have one criticism of the physical design and that is you cannot use the phone effectively if it is on a hard flat surface. This is due to the butt seam in the leather back acting as a pivot point and causing the phone to rock side to side. A usage case for me is to have the phone sitting on my desk and to type a text message on it. This is simply not possible with this phone.
The screen is excellent. Colours are very well reproduced and the colour balance is one of the best I have come across. When I have done a colour balance comparison the phone comes up a little on the blue side. But that for me is a lot nicer than the yellow you see on most other phones. It is also no where near the saturation levels of Samsung. I get no light bleed or detectable changes in brightness or colour and if there are pixels there somewhere they are way too small for me to see :P
Battery usage for me has been fine in most usage cases. By the end of the work day my phone is reporting that voice calls are using the same amount of battery as screen time, about 30%, and a full battery at 7am will be sitting around 35% come 6pm. In the evening though I have found that the battery will get annihilated by some of the games I am playing. Clash of Clans for example will chew 25%-30% of the battery per hour. That said those games smash my Nexus 9 as well.
Even when I am playing games for extended periods, usually plugged into the mains, I don't find heat to ever be a problem. The phone gets a little warmer than ambient but nothing more. I'm not sure if that is a side effect of the leather back or if the phone actually does run pretty cool but this phone is noticeably coole