The LG G4 with its much touted camera capabilities is a device I have been looking forward to trying out. With the device now officially released in Singapore, I got my hands on one, and would like to share some of my thoughts on the device after spending a bit of time with it.
In terms of design, the phone is not a far departure from LG's design of old. With the front dominated mostly by the display with an LG logo under the screen. On the rear, you have rear-mounted power and volume buttons right under the camera, by now a hallmark of LG’s devices. The buttons are all very easy to press, giving a nice solid click. It becomes second nature once you get used to them.
Overall it feels more like an evolutionary design rather than revolutionary. The device is still made out of mostly plastic, including the chrome sides. Which does dampen the premium look a little, especially when so many other manufacturers have moved on to metal builds.
The whole phone also curves slightly, which I would say is more for design rather than function. Unless you place the phone face down, you are probably not going to notice the curve immediately like you would on the G Flex 2.
LG has always been good with making their phones feel smaller than it actually is. With the LG G2, they packed a 5.2” screen into a device that felt like a 5” phone, with a Screen-to-Body ratio of 76.28%. However since then that ratio has been dropping with each iteration for some reason, with the G3 at 75.22%, and the G4 now at 72.46%. Despite that, the LG G4 still feels pretty easy to handle despite its increase in size over the G3, but personally I am a fan of a smaller form factor.
The highlight of the design this time round is the colour, and material options for the rear cover. The Shiny Gold, and Metallic Gray variant are made out of plastic, with a diamond pattern. Then of course the star of the show, the vegetable tanned, full grain leather variants. It comes in brown, black, and red, each with its own type of texture. (There is a Ceramic White variant as well that is not available as of now.)
Personally, I am a fan of the brown leather variant which feels slightly grippy, but still relatively smooth to the touch. I am not so sure about the stitching right in the middle though. While the looks may be up to personal tastes, functionality wise it makes little sense. When the phone is on a flat surface, the stitchings makes the phone wobbles around. More so than other devices with curved backs like the Nexus 6, or Moto X.
While LG might not be the first to use leather in their products, I prefer their implementation over Motorola’s. On the 2nd generation Moto X, you can choose leather backs, but those are non-user replaceable. So while having a bit of wear gives the leather a bit of character, if you accidentally damage the back, you are out of luck. So most people end up putting a case over it, making it pointless to get a phone with leather back. On the G4 however, you can simply purchase another back cover.
The front on the device houses a 1440 x 2560 pixels, QHD IPS LCD display at ~538 ppi. The display is what LG calls “Quantum Display”, which is supposed to be able to produce higher contrasts, better colours, and better accuracy. The display also uses In-cell Touch Display technology, producing a display that has better touch sensitivity, colour reproduction, and daylight visibility.
To me the display really does look pretty stunning, with great viewing angles, and daylight visibility. This is definitely one of the better LCD display I have seen on a mobile device.
The phone packs a Qualcomm Snapdragon 808 Hexa-core CPU, Adreno 418 GPU, 3GB of RAM, and 32GB of internal storage. While on paper it looks like a weaker version of the Snapdragon 810, in my time with it, the phones feels snappy most of the time, and handled intensive games like Real Racing 3 with ease.
I did notice some UI stutter, dropped frames, and a bit of lag occasionally, but nothing major. It is probably just down to optimisation of the UI rather than the lack of horsepower. I have noticed similar behaviour on pretty much all recent flagship devices, and at this point I think Android Lollipop is partly to blame. Unless you are really trying to look for them, you probably will not notice those.
The Snapdragon 810 has taken a lot of flak in the news, which many suspect was why the G4 used the 808 instead. Though LG claims that the Snapdragon 808 was developed in conjunction with their engineers to get the best out of the G4, with the priority being the efficiency of the chipset. No matter what the reason may be, the main concern to me as a consumer is how it performs in my day to day usage. There are no instances when using the G4 where I found performance lacking, and to me, that is more important than how high the numbers are in a synthetic benchmarks.
If there is anything worth nitpicking on the hardware front, it would probably be those rear-mounted speakers. While they are certainly plenty loud and clear, there is no escaping the fact that the speaker is firing away from you rather than towards you.
In a time where most OEMs have moved towards a non-expandable storage, and removable battery for their flagship devices, the LG G4 is one of the few flagship devices that still offer consumers those options. Even the Samsung Galaxy S6, which until the S5 still featured those expandability options, went the non-removable route.
To me it is one of those things that are nice to have, but not a must. Both approach has their own pros and cons. Personally, I do not mind not having removable battery, and expandable storage.
On the removable battery, the LG G4 uses a 3000 mAh battery. In my short time with it, the battery seemed decent, but not fantastic. It seemed a little better than the Galaxy S6, but not a significance difference in my opinion.
LG UI has come a long way at version 4.0, with each version looking closer to stock Android than the one before it. LG’s UX 4.0 comes with its own improvements like Dual Window mode, Smart Bulletin, Smart Notice, Knock Code, etc.
Like Samsung, LG tried to pack in a lot of features into the device. Some of them, like Knock Code and Smart settings (automate tasks, for example launching music player when earphones are plugged in) are genuinely useful. Others like Smart Notice, and Smart Bulletin, a little less so. But on the bright side, you can turn off most of them if you like.
The design of the UI however, still leaves much to be desired. It is apparent that LG tried to inject its own design flair into Material Design. Some works well, while others not so much. App icons and iconography for example looks a little out of place. Settings menu for example looks convoluted, and segmented, but thankfully can be salvaged via a setting change.
The size of the navigation buttons is baffling too. The back, home, and recent apps buttons are not visually balanced in size unlike that of stock Android. LG instead just made a bounding box for those three icons, and enlarged them to the same size. The result is a home button that looks bigger than the back button, and the recent apps button looks bigger than the home button.
This has been the same since Lollipop was released on LG devices, and I have been hoping they would tweak it, but LG never did. To some they may say that this is a minor thing, but to me I do not see it that way. When it comes to UI design, details matter. Especially on the 3 buttons that you use countless times a day, and is visible no matter what you are doing on the phone. To me if they can compromise in something so obvious and user-facing, it is no wonder why a lot of people I know do not like LG’s UI. All they had to do, was not change the size of the buttons from stock Lollipop. But LG did, and messed it up anyway.
Overall while not my favourite, with a little bit of tweaking, and turning off features, I was able to get the UI to a point where I would be alright with using it without the need to install a custom launcher.
Which brings us to the camera of the G4, the main reason why this phone received as much attention as it did. The G4 has a 16MP sensor, with f/1.8 aperture, optical image stabilisation (OIS+), laser auto-focus, and a new colour spectrum sensor. Combined, these are definitely one of the best camera specifications you would find on a smartphone to date.
We will get to the image quality a little later, but let us start from the camera UI first. This time round LG went for a much simpler setup with only 3 main camera modes, “Simple, Auto, and Manual”. Simple mode as the name implies only allow you to capture images without any options to tweak the shots. Auto mode allows some tweaking, but the camera mostly take care of all the settings and modes for you. Manual mode as the name implies, allows for one of the most comprehensive manual controls on a smartphone.
LG has also built in a way to quickly launch the camera, and capture a shot by double clicking the volume button. It works pretty well, and is certainly a quick way to capture a shot. Though the feature is limited in the sense some times the focusing takes a bit of time too, and the placement of the volume button means that this is only comfortable to use for a portrait shot.
In order to take a landscape you would have to hold the phone in an unsteady, awkward position. I would prefer if the double click was just to launch the camera only.
Auto mode works great in pretty much most situations, with the camera deciding for itself when to use low light mode, or HDR mode. It is simple to use, and is able to take great looking images with ease most of the time. However, sometimes I did notice the tendency to over-expose a little. In those instances, a quick way to control the auto-exposure (AE) like on iOS would come in really handy.
Another thing I noted is that auto mode sometimes do not engage HDR mode even when I think that it should.
(100% crop)
Image quality is great in daylight as one would expect, but if I were to pixel-peep, there are hints of slightly over-agressive noise reduction, and quite a bit of sharpening. Colour reproduction was good, and the dynamic range of the sensor was excellent too.
(G4 Auto mode, ISO 1500, Exposure 1/10)
Image quality is excellent in low light, though the tendency to over-agressively reduce noise, and sharpen image is still very much apparent. When the shots are in focus, the details looks nice and sharp (albeit a little too sharp). The problem comes in when there is camera shake while capturing the shot. Even a little bit of shake combined with an insufficiently quick shutter speed is all it takes, and the G4 attempt to sharpen those blur as well. So while the photos look sharp when viewed at a small size, zoom in and you will see that there are very little detail despite looking sharp. So do take note of that while taking images at night.
(50% crop, G4 Auto mode: ISO 1500, Exposure 1/10s)
If you look at the 50% crop, you would see how sharp the image is.
(G4 Auto mode: ISO 850, Exposure 1/13s)
(G4 Manual mode: ISO 250, Exposure 1/8s)
(G4 Auto mode: ISO 850, Exposure 1/30s)
Of course not forgetting about the much advertised Manual Mode on the G4, which really does allow more control compared to other flagship devices like the HTC One M9, or Samsung Galaxy S6.
The Manual Mode would likely be a photographer's dream come true, with the ability to tweak a shot to their heart's content. On the bottom row, you can change white balance, manual focusing, exposure value, ISO, shutter speed, and auto-exposure lock. Having a manual mode does allow for more versatility, and control. The simplest example would be light trail shots.
(G4 Manual mode: ISO 50, Exposure 2s)
Though before you get too excited, there are hardware limitations. Take the aperture for example, which is fixed at f/1.8. In the lighting condition of the shot above, at the lowest ISO, and just 2s exposure, the shot is properly exposed. Which means any longer than that, the shot would turn out over -exposed. Want to take a photo of a silky waterfall in bright daylight? You probably would not be able to even at the lowest ISO settings. An exposure long enough to capture water movement would probably over-expose the shot, and an exposure too short will just freeze the water in their place.
If you want to take photos in even dimmer conditions, and use an even longer exposure, you would probably want to use a tripod instead. In the shot above, I rested the phone on a railing and held it as steady as I could. Even then, I can still see camera shake in the shot when zoomed in. It is less obvious only because of LG's aggressive sharpening.
While I love the idea of being able to use an exposure as high as 30s if I so choose, personally if I had to bring a tripod around with me to use it, I might as well just bring along a DSLR. To me on a smartphone, its camera should be easy to use to capture great looking shots, and Manual mode is certainly not easy. Manual mode to me is simply a bonus feature, but not the most important aspect of a smartphone camera.
Overall, the camera performance of the LG G4 is definitely one of the best out there in the market. The points mentioned above were really just me nitpicking. I am sure most people who have picked up the LG G4 will be supremely happy with the camera performance of this device.
-----
The LG G4 is an easy device to recommend. If you want removable battery, and expandable storage, the G4 is pretty much the only option these days. The phone's performance is pretty much what you would expect from a flagship device. The screen looks great. The camera quality is great. Though the build quality of the phone might not be as solid as other metal-clad devices, the leather backs does make up for it since they look and feel great.
The phone has its minor quirks, and flaws, and LG's UX 4.0 is still too heavy-handed for my liking. But there is nothing I would really consider to be a deal-breaker. Considering how strong Samsung's showing was this year, it is impressive to see LG being able to keep up with its nearest competitor. Providing a flagship device that is not only comparable, but has clear differentiation to set itself apart.
