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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.
'Magic Slot' in translates to the English phase 'proprietary, non interoperable interface'
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
I've got a smartphone...sure, it's great. But I can't honestly say that I feel I've gotten the upfront price plus the monthly fee's worth of utility/entertainment out of it.
What's everyone else's experiences with smartphones?
PS: I don't reply to ACs.
There's little question this is a sponsored post.
Sponsored? Hell, I found this summary in the Firehose and was about to mod it binspam, even though it had already been accepted. I think I'll head on back to the Firehose and do just that.
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
Because I'm really sick and tired of being forced to buy new phones every time I want to switch carriers.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
yet another phone that requires a fucking degree in computer science to be able to make a call on!
</Luddite>
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
I mean I could see third party peoples like Beltek making docking stations to attach the phone to TVs, or keyboard+monitor+mouse combo or interfaces to A/V receivers...
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
The phone ecosystem is in dire need of a REAL system bus expansion architecture.
Android especially is based on linux (while iOS is based on MacOSX, which is based partly on BSD), which has baked in support for mixed CPU types, exotic memory technologies, and other goodies. A proper system bus implementation could get all that footwork brought to work for the device in question.
Say for instance, another CPU, or added RAM, a different cellular modem (or satellite modem), an ethernet jack, perhaps even eSATA or a physical serial port.
They could solve the driver/kernel module issue with an MTD squashfs with a digital signature on it, baked into each device. Contains the module source code and config script along with a vetted compiler binary. builds the module, then drops it in the system storage. Complies with GPL completely that way, and the end user doesnt need to see anything other than a "please wait while your device is configured." splash from android. (this mechanism is a security hole big enough to drive a bus through. Needs secure digital signature enforcement on the partition inside the device, read only partition in the device, and other such restrictions to avoid giving a mechanism to attackers with local access. This isnt necessarily a bad thing either. It means that a root user enabling card with dummy hardware could be put in the slot to give end users root access to their device. (contains dummy compile script, and copies SU, Busybox, and pals to the device) Sadly, it could be used by law enforcement for the same purposes. Using encrypting filesystems becomes important.)
Existing drivers can be leveraged if the slot resembles an express card slot at the software level.
If I were designing a slot architecture for android, this is the direction I would take anyway. (Just remember that a slot that can do anything truly useful (like add a GPU, add RAM, etc), needs access to the front side bus, which basically makes it a naked debug port through which law enforcement can insert their deeply coveted "magic keys". They can have their own little system on chip attached that shares the bus with the host cpu, and can do anything the host cpu does, for better or for worse. I dont consider that a good thing, but I dont see a solution, other than to just not have the port at all.)
I like the idea of a standards based expansion port for cellphones that lets you add beefier hardware later. But to do that right, and keep it user friendly, you either need to distribute kernel modules over the store with crypto, or do what I proposed above, and have a naked access port to the system bus. (with all the danger that enables.)
From a security standpoint, sandboxing/segregating the memory range associated with the slot and some other tricks might improve matters, by preventing DMA reads from devices sitting in that range from seeing main system memory, and requring active participation from the host cpu for data moves in and out, thus crippling "magic key" use, but it would also make it much harder to put certain kinds of hardware on the port.
Kind of a curious thought experiment. How would you guys go about it?
Why use any bleeping letter acronym at all? How hard is it to just say "2560x1440"? Clear, unambiguous, and doesn't require a google search to understand.
A metal phone which keeps the removable battery. THAT is a feature I'd like some other phone manufacturers copying.
I don't care much about metal, plastic is fine by me but since all flagships seem to going to metal it's nice that someone still gives you the posibility of changing the battery on your own.
Also the expansion slot is a nice tech.
Thats the answer, right there. Marketdroids are terrified that you might understand what you are buying. It is their worst nightmare, In fact, it makes you a terrorist!
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
I'm normally an aggressive tech upgrader but didn't see anything in the G4 worthy of an upgrade and these G5 specs don't excite me either.
We heard a lot of talk about phones that can be built up like LEGOs, and now this phone has one card slot of some kind. Maybe what we need is a standard (that 10% of the phones would adopt) for an expansion slot. The trick would be standard device drivers, as that would mean a major rewrite of Android, and only Google can do that.
This is relevant to my interests. This phone is almost perfect... Removable battery, SD card slot, excellent specs... The only remaining questions are over Qi wireless charging, cost and what the OS is like.
Stock Android would be ideal... Anyone know what LG are like for updates?
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Top of the line hardware with bottom of the barrel firmware updates. Im betting you will be lucky to get 1 update for the two years they expect you to own this phone and zero updates after 2 years. Meanwhile your Google nexus phone has monthly updates for a good 4 years.
I typically spend about $125 to get a phone similar to what cost $600 a year prior, and I spend $25/month with Boost mobile.
Right now, I'm in the car, waiting 10 minutes while my wife runs into the store. Normally when I have to wait a few minutes, I spend the time studying on my phone. While I'm driving I listen to lectures I downloaded to my phone. Between listening while driving amd reading or writing while waiting, I get about an hour of school done per day, using time that would otherwise be wasted.
A bit mixed to be honest. The G4 was promised Marshmellow in October, and phones in Poland did get it then. But there might have been some issues as it seems to be taking forever for it to roll out to the rest of the world. At the moment more of the world doesn't have the update than does.
That said the G4 is a brilliant phone. The only drawback is that it doesn't come with Qi charging as standard, but it is only a $5 sticker inside the back cover to add it.
Out of curiousity, how many times have you replaced your battery in those four years?
I'm still on a Nexus 5, no removable battery, no battery life issues. I find myself confused by this constant demand for a replaceable battery.
Thanks, I appreciate you taking the time to reply.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
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
The G3 and G4 were both the first phones to market with lollipop and marshmallow respectively.
Oops, replied further down the thread for some reason. The G3 and G4 were both first to market with lollipop and marshmallow respectively. My G4 has survived a drop into a full bathtub, and when it got dropped and screen shattered, after I got there replacement screen it was a matter of removing 11 Phillips screws from the back plane, pulling off the bad display unit, and unhooking both cameras and the display connector. I had the new one installed, put together, and running in 7 minutes without having to consult instructions... I wish all phones were this simple to work on! I used Samsung from galaxy 1-4, but unless they give me a compelling reason to drop them LG is my go to manufacturer now and for the foreseeable future.
This is the main reason why US customers keep paying so much for their contracts and is so difficult to change carriers. The only carrier supporting the European (and actually most worldwide carrier models) is T-mobile. If you live in an area with a decent T-Mobile coverage, I'd suggest people to switch to them and vote with their SIM cards. Maybe other carriers would follow up.
Thanks for that. I would have bought a Nexus 6P already if it had Qi capability. That was a huge loss from the previous generation.
Apart from the LG custom OS and updates issue, which in fairness doesn't seem that bad (compared to TouchWiz and HTC's crap), it seems like pretty much the perfect phone. If it hits the expected price it will be competitive with the Nexus 6P. Maybe they could even do a Play Edition.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Makes a lot of sense to replace the battery on e.g. a 10-year-old phone. I'm talking non-smart phones here, they seem to last for a long time if not subject to theft or loss.
Smartphones are immature yet. No adequate software support, or perhaps you could use it long term as long as you don't log in to anything on the internet. 10 years support with weekly security updates would be acceptable.
If you're investing in a phone for a decade, I can understand the need to simply replace the limited life parts.
I'm clearly a 1%er, I expect a new toy every couple of years (although I'm also picky, hence still being on the original Nexus 5).
I think they are great. Good enough that after I owned one for a couple of months my wife bought the same one based on my experience.
You can get them for AU$500 which makes them one of the cheapest flagships.
"The aluminum unibody G5 brings with it a 5.3-inch QHD display with an Always One mode"
So I was confused as to what "Always One" was about, but apparently that's just a typo of Always-On. A better description is here, where apparently the display can stay on using 0.8% battery/h due to not being tied to the primary processor.
Sounds neat, although I'd still like to see a phone that tries something like a hybrid e-paper display or something of the like
I dig that LG is using the slot to allow them to create 1 base phone and allow the end user to pick the guts inside of it... but I worry that this will lead us down the road of manufacturers creating expensive sub-par devices, and then forcing us to buy a bunch of "PLUS" or "Premium" expansions bring the phone up to a respectable spec.
I'm not really buying phones for a decade (though the dumb phone might last quite long) but in the near future I think the useful lifetime of hardware will only increase. E.g. a 10-year-old desktop is now a Core 2 Duo beast with 2GB RAM and its performance is still current, if not for slight inconvenience such as software video decoding and booting time of more than 20 seconds. :) (ok, rather 2GB)
What when the low end smartphones have 64bit and 4GB RAM?
Asking for a 10-year OS on a smartphone is a bit of mindless provocation but eventually more people will forget that phone needs be replaced much often (barring hardware failure or thinking replacing broken or scratched glass is not worth the hassle or expense). An early example might be the iPhone 4S : it's nearing 5 years and still supported.