LG G5

While most phone makers follow a uniform design language for their devices, LG has been constantly changing (read improving) the aesthetics of its flagship ‘G’ series. The Korean giant had been holding back until now to go the all-metal way for its flagships. But that changes with the G5, as the smartphone is crafted entirely from metal.

With the G3, the Korean company was among the first few manufacturers to jump on the 2k bandwagon. The LG G5 also keeps things the same with a rich 2k resolution, although the sharpness is slightly better thanks to the smaller display of 5.3-inches, which results in a pixel density of 554ppi. The IPS panel also offers good colour saturation and wide viewing angles. The brightness levels are also decent, although we did find it to be a tad low for our liking, especially in outdoor conditions. It was slightly difficult to make out the text under harsh sunlight.

Unlike most Android skins, LG’s UI is known to only add a coat of visual changes in terms of icons along with some useful additions on top of Android. With the G5 however, the company is following in the footsteps of Chinese companies with its skin simply dubbed LG UX 5.0. While earlier, LG's devices offered a dedicated app drawer, now the homescreen doubles up as an app launcher too. Of course, the LG G5 ships with the latest iteration of Android, i.e. 6.0 Marshmallow.

Without a doubt, Samsung smartphones reign when it comes to photography in the Android arena. However, one brand that manages to keep up with the Chaebol is its counterpart LG. The previous flagships from LG have impressed us, and the G5 takes it up a notch. What’s more interesting is that LG isn’t following the herd since most high-end offerings nowadays are reducing the megapixels in a bid to offer better image quality. Instead, the LG G5 offers not one, but two cameras at the back – one with 16-megapixels resolution with a wide aperture of f/1.8 and the secondary shooter rated at 8MP. But unlike many other implementations of dual sensors, the G5 gives you the ability to get the wide-angle view of 135 degrees with a single click. The phone also brings forth useful features such as laser autofocus, LED flash and optical image stabilisation.

LG has always packed Qualcomm’s top-tier processor in its flagships so much so that the G Flex 2 (first impressions) was the first device to use the Snapdragon 810. However, due to the heating fiasco in SD810, the Korean giant had to use Snapdragon 808 in the G4 instead of the flagship 810 silicon from the chipmaker. But with the G5, the company has employed Qualcomm’s most powerful SoC, the Snapdragon 820. In fact, when it was unveiled at MWC in February, it was among the first few phones to come with this processor, which offers four custom-built Kryo cores based on 64-bit architecture. The processor offers two high-power cores tuned at 2.15GHz, while the low-power cores run at 1.6GHz. The CPU is accompanied by the Adreno 530 GPU for rendering graphics. The hardware makes sure that the LG G5 flies through anything thrown at it. There was nary an instance where we felt that it wasn’t able to handle heavy apps or games. We played Injustice: Gods Among us and Modern Combat 5: Blackout for hours, and it didn’t break into sweat even once.

Time and again, we have stated that specs are just a number, and that notion is strengthened further with the battery life of the LG G5. On paper, the 2,800mAh capacity seems a tad low considering today’s standards and the 2k display it has to power up. However, in real life, the battery should get you through your entire working day. Even with the Wi-Fi hotspot or GPS turned on, and gaming for a considerable time, the phone had some juice left towards the evening. On an average, we got screen-on time between three and a half to four hours, which is decent for the battery capacity. The phone excelled in our battery loop test as well, since it was able to run an HD video on loop for roughly 13 hours and 30 minutes, with both the brightness and volume set at 50 percent and only cellular connectivity turned on.