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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.
I thought it translated to "Springboard Expansion Slot", but I guess I'm showing my age.
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
Because I'm really sick and tired of being forced to buy new phones every time I want to switch carriers.
Seems to be only a situation that exists in the USA. Here in Europe at most we just have to unlock the phone to work with all carriers assuming its locket at all, shove a new SIM card from the new provider in the phone and turn it on.
I only please one person per day. Today is not your day. Tomorrow isn't looking good either. - Scott Adams
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
You use your phone to make calls with? How quaint.
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a 747 filled with CD-ROMs.
Buy a reasonable smartphone phone, pay it up front so you don't get on the "subsidized treadmill", and a cheap pay-as-you-go plan, and you will find your monthly bill dropping by between half and 3/4. It's not like they have to be replaced at 2 years + 1 day.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
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.
The one I'm using now cost $30. I don't mean "$30 plus a two year contract", I mean that was the contractless cost of it. That's roughly what I paid for my last featurephone.
One thing I've learned from the experience is that a cheap phone is generally going to be better than a hipster phone. The cheap phone will have buttons on it, something hipsters demand be removed on your $300-600 models because they, uh, destroy the fine lines of the phone or something? The cheap phone will have an SD card slot because it knows it doesn't come with enough memory, the hipster phone will assume 16Gb is enough for anyone. The cheap phone will have a long life removable battery because they're trying to sell to people with "You'll find this useful, and it's cheap!" rather than "This is the most exotic thing you will buy for three months, after which you'll throw it away and spend $300-600 on the next model."
Weird, and not what I was expecting. And yeah, I like it and think it was totally worth $30.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
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.
Actually, according to Ars Technica, LG is planning on creating some sort of open ecosystem for third-party hardware. What exactly that means is yet to be seen, but they've at least said that is in their plans.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
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
What's everyone else's experiences with smartphones?
I can communicate by text anywhere and everywhere... I am expected to do so, too.
I can use the web anywhere and everywhere.
I no longer get lost outdoors. I still get lost in large shopping malls and other large indoor places.
I always have a decent compact camera with me.
Podcasts, music and ebooks are invaluable whenever I have to sit and wait somewhere.
(Of course, you can get all of these benefits by carrying a tablet, like an iPad Mini or a small Android tablet with you.)
I buy a top of the line iPhone every year and it gets used hard, for four years, by every member of my family. By the time four years are up and everyone has used it, it's largely obsolete in terms of performance due to operating system changes. At that point, I keep it around for another year mostly as a test platform for email connectivity on whatever the newest OS release it will run.
So far, the hardware has held up. Only the 3GS had a problem with the up/down volume rocker button cover falling off, every other one has been fine other than the decline in battery capacity.
As for value, that's highly dependent on your income and perception. I feel like I've gotten 4+ years of value out of it personally, but it's a minor expense relative to our income and about half of the cost is compensated by our employers, too. I work as a consultant, so it's my primary voice phone, supplies a good chunk of my internet access on the road, provides mapping and entertainment in the car, so I feel like I get a lot of overall value out of it.
Europe has two things going for it here. The first is that they've been careful allocating frequencies, and the second is that they've told the carriers that they have to agree on common standards and interoperable equipment (with "personal mobility" - that is, SIM cards.) The phone companies came up with the GSM family of standards (GSM, UMTS, and now LTE) and it all pretty much just works.
The US didn't do any of this, partially because of lobbying by a certain semi-conductor/wireless research company, and partially because they didn't understand what Europe was doing, so we ended up with multiple conflicting standards and rather a lot of different frequency bands to run them on.
This means that we have two nationwide carriers who run GSM family networks, plus two that run a mix of IS-95/2000 networks, that are finally implementing LTE, but not the rest of the GSM standards. As LTE is still to a certain extent in flux (there's something like three different ways to do voice, for instance) and LTE isn't nationwide yet, nobody can sell a simple device that works anywhere in the US. It's needlessly expensive to support both cdmaOne family standards and GSM family, and the carriers are still buying new swathes of spectrum that need hardware support.
Which sucks.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
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.
LG is planning on creating some sort of open ecosystem for third-party hardware. What exactly that means is yet to be seen...
It means it will be like Apple... anyone is free to develop products for the proprietary, non interoperable interface, you just have to pay LG a nice fee to do so.