So I've had the G4 for two weeks now, and I think it's a really good phone. I doubt anyone who owned it would be really disappointed with it. It checks a lot of boxes, doesn't really have any major weakness, but I don't think I'll be hanging on to the phone for too long.
My mini-review/impressions:
- The screen is excellent. I like it more than the S6 screen, which I felt was
too saturated. The G4 screen is bright, has great calibration, nice colours etc. No complaints there. The size is also really great for media content. Watching youtube videos on the 5.5" is really nice and it's great sitting on the train and not having to have the screen so close to me. Could have it just that little bit further and still make out all the finer details. It's great. If I had a screen of this quality on every phone I used, I'd be very happy.
- The camera is very good. Comparing the S6 camera to the G4 camera, they both have strengths and weaknesses. The G4 seems to do better with colour accuracy and lower light shots, whereas I feel the S6 handles exposure levels better. The G4 balances colours better, so when I took a photo on the G4, it processed the image to be more accurate to the real thing than the S6 which I felt would saturate things a little bit extra (or I'm not sure if it looked like that due to the screen saturation levels). However the G4 tends to over sharpen images just a tad so when you zoom in, you notice grain around defined lines which shouldn't be there. It seems like they were so focused on the phone taking crisp images that they wrote it to over sharpen just a bit. Overall though, both cameras are very good and I don't think anyone would be disappointed with the G4 camera. It's low light performance is amazing. I was surprised at how well it would handle dimly lit shots.
- Performance was great. Again no major complaints there. It did have some awkward stutter moments here and there and some lags and hangs, but for the most part, it was very fast and smooth. I liked that pressing the multi-task button would pop up the apps right away, whereas there's a solid second delay on the S6, and the G4 seemed to handle ram management better (which is atrocious on the S6). Pleased with the performance, despite a few hiccups. Snapdragon 808 to me is just a number and I don't care how 'powerful' it is. I'd say it provided an overall faster and more consistent performance than the S6 to me. Just going around the UI, opening apps, doing things I want to do happens faster on the G4 than the S6 for me.
- The build to me was a disappointment. I had the black leather model and although I had read 'premium' this and 'quality' that, I didn't find the G4 feeling premium at all. It just felt like a standard plastic phone with a leather back. It wasn't even a really nice leather like you get in a car seat or furniture. It was a hard, almost plastic feeling leather to me. Plus for its size, the phone felt really light and didn't feel 'solid' like the HTC One phones or the S6 feels. Just felt like a plastic phone that has been made for years now. I definitely wouldn't attribute the word 'premium' to the feel of the G4. Maybe the brown leather feels different, but I'm not signing praises for the black leather. Hopefully there's a markedly improvement in the G5 next year. The stitched seam down the middle would cause the phone to tilt to one side as well as cause the phone to wobble majorly if I wanted to type while the phone was down on a flat surface. Would bounce around and spin as I'd type. The build/design was probably the most disappointing aspect of the phone to me.
- The size was just a fraction too big for me.
Kinda like how Andrew Martonik posted in his article. While it is a 5.5" screen in a seemingly smallish body, but the sharp edges, and the bezels just pushed it ever so slightly into 'too large' for me. I couldn't navigate through the phone comfortably with one hand. I couldn't pull down the notification shade and hit the settings icon comfortably or reach the Google search widget easily without hitting the mic button on it. If it were the G3 size and design, it would have helped. As it is, I could just never use it comfortably. Oh and the slight curve on the screen - completely irrelevant. Added absolutely no benefit to the phone, I didn't even realise it was there. Don't know why they went with the curved phone, but whatever. It's not a 'feature' as in it improves anything about the phone, it just seems like a decision LG wanted to make to try and make the phone appear cooler than what it would have been with a flat screen.
- Buttons on the back. I'm yet to be convinced this provides any tangible benefit to using the phone. If the phone didn't have double tap to wake, then having the buttons on the back would have been one of the dumbest decisions and OEM could have made. Luckily it does have double tap to wake, however I don't find the back buttons practical or tangibly useful over side buttons. I
still find myself 'searching' for the right button and constantly find myself pressing the camera module instead of the power button. Maybe it'll take longer to grow on me, but as it stands, I'm not a fan. Oh, and the buttons feel so cheap and tacky as well. They feel like the cheapest plastic LG could source to put on there. Doesn't have a nice click to them that the metal phones these days have (iP6, S6, One M9 etc).
- Sound is very loud, good quality, and unfortunately has poor range. The lowest volume of the sound (the setting just above mute) is so loud. Every other phone I've owned I usually just put it on the lowest volume setting so when I'm at work, my notification sound (the Hangouts default sound) will just ping softly. With the G4, it's a loud, intrusive ping. Working in a quiet office, it's not acceptable, so I've had to turn it to mute from now on. Not a big deal right? Well no, because also for alarms, the tone is so loud even at its softest setting, I've had to search for some tune that starts off extremely soft then builds up otherwise the phone would just jump scare me into waking me up. It's great that the volume can get loud, but I don't always want loud. The point of having a low volume is because I want a
low volume.....
- Battery life for me was quite good. Better than the S6 easily. On an average day, I'm hitting around 5 - 5.5 hours screen time. Very acceptable to me over the 3.5 - 4 hours screen time I was getting on the S6. No complaints about battery, and having it removable is a bonus, even if I never used it.
- I also like that the G4 is extremely customisable to the point that you can choose what gallery app you want your default app to be. So going from the camera, you can pick to have Google Photos as the default gallery app. I like that. The S6 only has its own gallery app to use as the default, which doesn't help me as our software here doesn't allow auto rotate in images on the gallery.
- The software I'm still not a fan of. It's better than the G3's software, but not amazingly so. There were multiple things that I didn't like how the software - how the sound profiles work, how the 'smart' stuff didn't work (could never get it to auto mute when I was at work), didn't like the stock theme nor anything on the store, didn't like the lockscreen swipe options (all had gaudy animations). I liked that you could double press the volume down key to wake up the phone and launch the camera, but that function only works when the screen is off. If the phone is awake and I want to snap a pick, I can't just double press the volume down to launch the camera. The S6 allows you to double press the home button from literally anywhere and the camera will launch, imo a better implementation of the feature. Overall the software of the G4 and S6 didn't work for me. I don't particularly
like using either phone, I just use them because I have them. I
liked using the Nexus 5, I
liked using the HTC One M8. Don't feel the same with the G4 or S6 unfortunately.
Jerry has had a post stating the Nexus 6 is still the best Android phone on the market. While I haven't used it, I do agree that the software experience is so important to the overall experience, that I wouldn't doubt his assertion. I wish LG and Samsung really pulled their heads on and focused more on software than anything else. HTC, Motorola and Sony in my opinion have don't really decent jobs with their software, which has changes from stock Android, however is still nice to use. I don't feel LG or Samsung are in the same ballpark.
There's so much to really like about the G4. It's fast, it's crazy customisable, a smartphone-leading camera, great battery life - it's just an overall very usable, functional device. I think just for me, it's not the home-run I was hoping for. Buying both the S6 and G4, I've come to realise just how important software is on a phone, even if an OEM does manage to nail the hardware.
If you managed to read it all, I appreciate it. Just note that I'm not having a dig at the phone, it's easily one of the best on the market and wouldn't ever dissuade someone from getting it. It's a great phone, just not for me. Just my very subjective nit-picks.
I'll move on to the Nexus phone later and the year, and I actually can't wait to move to it.
EDIT: Just realised this is actually an extremely long post....so much for the 'mini' review/impressions. Sorry!
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