LG’s flirtation with modular design didn’t last long. The LG G6 is out in the wild, as is the LG V30, and both dispense with the LG G5’s modular design.
If you want to get hold of an LG G5 now, you’ll need to do so from a third party as a SIM free offering. At the time of writing, the LG G5 can be bought new from sellers over Amazon for £279.99. For comparison, the LG G6 will currently set you back £355. That’s not a vast difference, but it could be enough to tip you in the favour of the LG G5.
In the sub-£300 price range, you also have the Samsung Galaxy A3 and the excellent Honor 7X. If you’re willing to pay slightly more, there’s also the fantastic Honor 9. You may want to consider these before pushing on with the LG G5.
Jonathan Bray’s original review continues below:
LG G5 review
The LG G5 is a smartphone that wants to be different. Instead of aping Apple and Samsung, firms that choose to seal their flagship smartphones firmly shut, LG has gone entirely the other way in 2016. It has completely remodeled its flagship handset to incorporate a removable battery, upgradeable storage and a system that, excitingly, allows users to expand the phone’s capabilities through the connection of add-on modules.
And while Google’s Project Ara fully modular smartphone remains a pipe dream long after its first appearance, LG’s version is here now, it’s real, and you can go out and buy one as soon as you finish reading this review.
In a very real sense, then, the LG G5 represents a watershed for the smartphone industry. By implementing this new approach to flagship smartphone production, LG has acknowledged that, actually, there’s a market for something a little different, and instead of attempting to milk its customers for every last penny it’s opening things up, making it easier to improve.
Moreover, it’s an approach that other manufacturers seem increasingly keen to mimic. Motorola’s Moto Z and Moto Z Force handsets, announced four months after the LG first broke cover, take a similar approach. They allowing expansion modules to be clipped onto the rear of the phone adding extra battery life, speakers, and even a projector to the phone’s core capabilities.
LG G5 review: Design
It’s a refreshing approach, and a laudable one, too, but perhaps the most ingenious thing about the LG G5 is that LG hasn’t had to revert to a shonky plastic back to do it. This is a handset that’s constructed with premium materials and a close attention to detail.
It’s finished in attractive anodised aluminium (this isn’t plastic, despite some early reports), flat at the rear and smoothly contoured towards the edges. It’s a far cry from LG’s previous flagship handsets, which were far more aggressive in their curves, and is a much more attractive phone for it. It isn’t completely free of seams and nail catches, but what there is appears to have been engineered to the finest of tolerances. It’s elegant and unfussy and perhaps just a tiny bit reminiscent of the Nexus 6P.
I’m not a big fan of the bulging camera housing; it spoils the overall look, but otherwise the G5 has a decent design, and is practical, too. A subtle ridge around the edge at the rear helps you grip the phone, and the top portion of the glass front curves gently backwards. Best of all, the matte finish on the phone’s chassis doesn’t pick up fingerprints anywhere near as readily as the glass-backed Galaxy S7 does.
I also like the position of the fingerprint reader in the centre at the rear, which doubles as the phone’s power button, and also that LG has finally seen fit to reposition the volume buttons. After a few years of rear-mounted volume keys, 2016 sees them return to their rightful place on the edges of the phone. This is most definitely a good thing.
The fact that it’s all wrapped up in a light (159g), slim (7.7mm) package certainly helps, and the mid-sized 5.3in display allows the LG G5 to strike the ideal balance between big-screen readability and easy pocketability.
LG G5 review: A phone you can expand
The only external sign of the LG G5’s modular approach is the pin-line seam that runs across the back of the phone at the bottom edge, and a small button on the left. Push this in and the LG G5’s expansion module disengages, allowing it to be withdrawn, complete with removable battery, from the end of the phone’s chassis.
Plugging in a new module in is a little more complicated. To connect the camera or music modules to the phone (see below for more details) or any of the other units for that matter, you first have to snap apart the battery and the bottom cap, attach the new module to the bottom end of the battery and slide the whole lot back into the phone. To replace the battery, remove the cap, attach it to the new power pack and slot back in.
It’s a deceptively simple idea, yet I’d like it to be slicker. Currently, it smacks very much of an engineering team fumbling its way into things rather than a confident step forward, but that’s what it takes to get a well-designed, solid-feeling phone that’s a little different, then I’m willing to accept that. And, don’t forget, you can also add extra storage via the microSD slot.
The only other thing to note is that, although the G5 is ultra-flexible, there’s no water- or dust-proofing and no dual-SIM capability. You can’t have everything, I suppose, although I can see the latter being added via an extra module at some point in the future – if the concept is a success.
LG G5 review: LG CAM Plus
Disappointingly, you can only buy two expansion modules for the LG G5’s ingenious expansion system. The first is focused on improving the camera interface, and it’s called the CAM Plus. This clips onto the bottom of the phone, replacing the plastic bottom lip, and adds a number of useful features. There’s a camera grip that’s aimed at helping you hold the phone more securely. In theory, as well as being more comfortable, you should get fewer blurry shots this way. There are also a few extra physical controls to help make the process of capturing photographs easier.
There are physical buttons for activating launching the camera app quickly, a two-stage shutter button, a rotary dial that lets you zoom in and out more easily and a dedicated movie recording button.
The CAM Plus also adds an extra booster battery, 1,200mAh in capacity, which allows you to shoot and record video in particular for a lot longer than you can with phone on its own.
In theory, it sounds like a great idea; in practice, it’s not so exciting or even practical. The first problem with the CAM Plus is its size. It’s just not big enough to provide enough grip to wrap your fingers around, jutting out only very slightly from the rear of the phone when connected. It’s nowhere near as big and comfortable a grip as Nokia supplied with the Lumia 1020 back in the day.
On the other hand, it’s not small enough to justify leaving attached to your phone all the time, adding just enough bulk to make it uncomfortable to squeeze into an average-sized front jeans pocket.
The buttons are a definite bonus. I especially like that the shutter button is a two-stage trigger, allowing you to lock focus with a half press and snap your photo with a full press. With my DSLR I frequently use this feature to focus on one part of a scene, then move the frame carefully and fire off the shot to keep my subject in focus. It’s great to have the facility to do this here, and it make reframing shots much easier.
However, the zoom wheel is small and fiddly to operate even for my slim digits, and it’s awkwardly positioned so it isn’t easy to reach both shutter button and zoom wheel without having to move your hand around on the grip.
Its most useful feature – that extra battery – isn’t all that impressive, either. True, it adds considerably more capacity, but for the size of the thing, I’d expect no less than double the size. As it is, the grip adds only a further 2hrs 50mins in our video rundown battery test (with the screen set to a brightness of 170cd/m2 and flight mode enabled). Again, it’s not enough to justify leaving the grip in place all day, every day.
LG G5 review: B&O Hi-Fi Plus
The other module is audio-focused – the B&O Play – and this fall into a similar category. This expansion module, developed in collaboration with high-end audio specialists Bang & Olufsen, adds a high-resolution audio DAC and headphone amplifier to the LG G5, in theory improving sound quality. It costs £150, though, so it’s not cheap.
The key question is, does it work? I plugged in a selection of headphones, from my reference Grado SR325i cans to cheaper in-ear jobs and found that it did make a difference, albeit small, to the depth, breadth and richness of the sound overall.
Is that difference big enough to justify £150? Absolutely not. If you’re really dissatisfied with the sound quality, I’d encourage you to invest in a much cheaper, battery-powered headphone amplifier instead. That will make a far bigger difference to your listening experience and will cost you far, far less. And as Know Your Mobile pointed out, sound output on this LG G5 module is a little lacking.
And that’s it for expansion modules, and it’s a fairly lean, unimpressive selection. All of which begs the question: will anyone actually go out and buy any of these modules? I suspect not, and unless LG continues to back the system for subsequent models, it’s an idea that’s likely to quietly fall by the wayside – quirky, intriguing and interesting, yes, but pointless in the long run.
LG G5 review: LG 360 VR
Also available for the LG G5 is a series of what LG is calling “Friends” – accessories that pair exclusively with the LG G5 and are managed via the preloaded LG Friends manager app.
There’s a pair of VR glasses, dubbed the LG 360 VR, a 360 camera (the LG 360 Cam), and a remote-controlled, spherical robot. We were sent the glasses and camera to test, but before you splash £200 on either, hold fire, because they aren’t that great.
First, the glasses. These connect to the LG G5’s USB Type-C port and work just like Samsung’s Gear VR headset.
The good things are that it’s self-contained, and because it has its own built-in display – a 1.88in, 960 x 720 screen split in two – it’s far less bulky than the Samsung headset. Where the Samsung headset is like a pair of ski goggles, the LG 360 VR is more akin to a pair of sunglasses, complete with folding arms and adjustable nose bridge. It even comes with its very own hard plastic glasses case.
A quick tour around the rest of the 360 VR reveals a 3.5mm headphone jack below the left eyepiece, two buttons above the right-hand eye and a proximity sensor between the lenses inside the headset so the headset can tell when you’ve put them on.
This is when you get to the problems, though. First, LG hasn’t done a great job on comfort. Worn for more than a handful of minutes the 360 is horribly uncomfortable, digging into the side of your head and the bridge of your nose uncomfortably.
Second, it’s tricky to adjust to get a crisp image. You have to remove the light-blocking skirt to get access to the lenses. Third, even when you do get everything in focus, the image is low-resolution and obviously pixellated.
The final problem is one of content. There simply isn’t any worth bothering with: a few VR tourist experiences via the Jaunt VR app, some VR YouTube videos, and that’s your lot. Not much for your £200 I think you’ll agree.
LG G5 review: LG 360 Cam
The LG 360 Cam is a bit more effective. Just like the Ricoh Theta S we reviewed last year and the forthcoming Samsung Gear 360 camera, it has a pair of wide-angle, 13-megapixel cameras facing in opposite directions, which it uses to capture true 360-degree, 26-megapixel stills and video up to 2K in resolution.
Unlike the 360 VR headset, this palm-sized camera is connected to the phone via Wi-Fi, with images and videos stored on a microSD card installed in a slot in the base.
If that all sounds impressive, the end results are far from great. It’s fun to play around with the 360 Cam initially, and it’s a great way to quickly capture room interiors for example. I can imagine an estate agent putting one of these to effective use.
However, once you’ve downloaded the images and videos to you LG G5, it quickly becomes apparent that the quality isn’t that great. Both stills and video look grainy, blurry and noisy, and after you’ve taken a few pictures and shot a handful of videos with it, the novelty is likely to quickly wear off.
LG G5 review: Cameras
The LG G5’s other big innovation, and one destined to be a little more useful, is its new-fangled rear camera arrangement. Not satisfied with just one snapper, LG has chosen to mount two cameras on the back of the LG G5: one standard camera, one wide-angle. At the front is another 8-megapixel module.
The former is a 16-megapixel shooter with a 75-degree field of view and it grabs excellent quality snaps. Its bright f/1.8 aperture, “laser autofocus” and three-axis optical image stabilisation should lead to good image quality in low light. In testing, that proved to be the case.
It isn’t as good as the Samsung Galaxy S7’s camera, or the Nexus 6P. Photographs look slightly noisier, and that’s mainly because in similar conditions the camera tends to choose a higher ISO level.
However, in good conditions, there’s little to choose between the LG G5’s camera and most other modern smartphone cameras. It can capture very good quality video at resolutions up to 4K, and there’s a host of different modes and effects to play around with, including a highly effective HDR mode, slow motion, and time-lapse video, plus a selection of frivolous effects that allow you to produce collages and picture-in-picture images that use all three cameras in quick succession.
The secondary camera is the most interesting aspect of the G5’s camera array. It has a 135-degree wide-angle lens with a resolution of eight megapixels, an aperture of f/2.4, and it captures a much broader view of a scene than the main camera. In the picture of the pizza below I held the camera at the same distance in each shot, which should give you a good idea of the difference this makes (the wide angle shot is on the right).
Switching between the two cameras is easy: you can pinch in or out quickly in the camera app, tap the selector icons, and in third party apps such as Instagram, Facebook or Twitter tapping the switch that normally cycles you between front-facing and rear-facing cameras also does the trick.
The downside of the wide-angle camera is that the edges of the image suffer from significant barrel distortion. If you’ve ever used a GoPro camera in “ultrawide” mode, or squinted through a front-door spy hole you’ll be familiar with the look.
The upside is that the quality is exceptional, but more than this, having such a broad field of view makes the camera ideal for capturing dramatic scenery, large groups of people and cityscapes. It’s a doddle to point and shoot, and you don’t even have to frame your shot particularly carefully either.
I love shooting with cameras like this and found myself making more use of the wide-angle lens more than I did the standard camera. It’s such fun that it makes me wonder why more smartphone manufacturers haven’t tried it before.
LG G5 review: Performance, display quality and battery life
The LG G5’s dramatic list of features continues inside, with a roster of top-flight internal components. Running the show is a quad-core Snapdragon 820 processor with 4GB of RAM and 32GB of ultra-fast UFS flash storage – and it’s just as quick and responsive as you’d expect.
In the Geekbench CPU tests its single-core results are about on a level with the Samsung Galaxy S7 and iPhone 6s, while its multi-core results are second only to the former. In gaming terms, it’s just as impressive, matching the Samsung Galaxy S7 in the GFXBench Manhattan 3.0 graphics test run at native resolution. Like the Samsung handset, it falls behind the iPhone 6s here because of its higher screen resolution, but its result in the 1080p offscreen test proves it has just as much graphics grunt.
Display quality is equally impressive. The IPS panel is sharp, with a resolution of 1,440 x 2,536, and LG claims it’ll reach up to 800cd/m2 in automatic brightness mode. By shining a bright torch at the front-facing camera I measured it spiking at 717cd/m2, ensuring readability in the harshest of conditions. If you set it to manual adjustment, it’ll reach a much lower level of 354cd/m2 at the top of the brightness slider, though, so you need to leave it in automatic mode to gain the full benefit of its ultra-bright backlight.
The LG G5’s display is colour accurate, too, covering 97.1% of the sRGB colour space, and it has another trick up its sleeve: just like the Samsung Galaxy S7, the LG G5 has an always-on display. Essentially what this means is that when you put the phone into standby, the screen permanently displays a clock and notification icons below it, so you don’t have to power-on your phone several times an hour.
If you’re worried about the impact this might have on battery life, LG says the feature consumes very little power – around 0.8% of the LG G5’s battery capacity per hour – in fact, less than the amount of power that switching on your phone repeatedly to check the time does.
The LG G5’s results in battery testing seem to back this up. Its 2,800mAh removable battery lasted 11hrs 10mins in our looping video test (with the screen set to 170cd/m2 and flight mode engaged). Although this is a long way short of the Samsung Galaxy S7’s 17hrs 48mins, it’s about average for a phone of this class.
Elsewhere, the LG G5 is equipped with all the wireless connections you’d expect of a modern-day flagship smartphone. There’s 802.11ac wireless, 4G cellular, NFC, Bluetooth 4.2 and there’s a USB Type-C socket on the bottom edge for charging, data transfer and the attachment of LG’s VR glasses accessory.
LG G5 Review: Software
As is normally the case with LG smartphones, the LG G5 employs a custom skin, which gives Android a subtly different look from stock. In the case of the LG G5, this launcher runs on top of Android 6 Marshmallow, the same as most smartphones launched this year, no doubt.
Normally, I’d like Android with LG’s skin too, but in my opinion the company’s more dramatic modification this year is a step too far. The big problem is that, just like Huawei’s Emotion UI, LG has removed the app drawer, forcing users to organise apps in folders on the homescreen, just as you do on iOS.
Many will find that irritating, but it is at least easy to reinstate the app drawer. You can do it via LG’s own “EasyHome” mode, but this comes complete with hideous jumbo icons; the best route is to install a third-party launcher such as Nova Launcher (my choice), the Google Now launcher or LG’s old-style launcher from last year, via the preinstalled LG SmartWorld app. My preference is for Nova. It transforms the look of the homescreen and app drawer, making it much more like stock Android. Which is a very good thing.
The only thing you can’t replace with a custom launcher is the settings menu and notifications menu. Whatever launcher software you decide to use, you’ll see a row of horizontally navigable quick toggles along with a brightness slider and notifications appearing below it. Fortunately, LG’s settings and notifications menus are at least more palatable than Huawei’s.
LG G5 review: Verdict, price, and availability
The LG G5 is one of the most interesting smartphones I’ve seen since the days of the LG Optimus 3D, and for that, I find myself predisposed to liking it. The trouble with the G5 is that, although ingenious, I’m not convinced it’s enough to get consumers to switch from the tried and tested.
People will still love their iPhones and Samsung Galaxy handsets no matter what LG does with its modular battery bay and accessories, simply because those phones are known quantities, and the LG G5 isn’t a big enough step forward.
I think it’s the price that will ultimately undermine the case for the LG G5, however. Buy it SIM free and it’s less expensive than the Samsung Galaxy S7 (but not by much), while on contract, prices are around the same. And yet in most key areas – battery life, camera quality, screen quality, and performance – it’s either on par or slightly behind. If you don’t want to spend this much, the Nexus 6P offers slightly slower performance and a less clever design, but an all-round package that’s almost as good for less cash.
Having said all that, though, the LG G5 is still a great smartphone, and if you’re upgrading from a two-year-old model from any manufacturer, you’ll love the speed boost and camera quality it brings with it, and especially that wide-angle snapper. It’s a five-star smartphone, then, but it isn’t quite the best.
Read more: Click here to check out the LG G5’s biggest rival, the Samsung Galaxy S7
LG G5 vs OnePlus 3
Since I first reviewed the LG G5, one significant new player has joined in the mid-price smartphone challenge. At £309, the OnePlus 3 costs half as much as many flagships, and even less than the LG G5, and yet it matches most of them for features and performance. How does it compare with the LG G5 specifically?
Well, its Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 SoC is the same one as you get with the LG G5 and it has 2GB more RAM. The OnePlus 3 has a larger, 5.5 “Optic” AMOLED screen, too, and battery life is significantly superior. Where it falls behind is in its flexibility. Although there’s 64GB standard internal storage you can’t expand that via microSD as you can with the LG, and although the camera is excellent, the LG’s dual-camera setup is more flexible. The OnePlus’ battery isn’t user replaceable, either.
So, there are compromises, but for a saving of well over £100, I’d be willing to absorb them. It’s why the OnePlus 3 is now sitting pretty at the top of our best smartphones chart.
LG G5 specifications |
|
| Processor | Quad-core 2.2GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 |
| RAM | 4GB |
| Screen size | 5.3in |
| Screen resolution | 2,560 x 1,440 |
| Screen type | IPS Quantum |
| Front camera | 8 megapixels |
| Rear camera | 16 + 8 megapixels |
| Flash | LED |
| GPS | Yes |
| Compass | Yes |
| Storage (free) | 32GB (23.5GB) |
| Memory card slot (supplied) | microSD |
| Wi-Fi | 802.11ac |
| Bluetooth | Bluetooth 4.2 |
| NFC | Yes |
| Wireless data | 4G |
| Size | 149 x 7.7 x 74mm |
| Weight | 159g |
| Operating system | Android 6.0.1 |
| Battery size | 2,800mAh |
| Price on contract (inc VAT) | Free on £32-per-month contract |
| Prepay price (inc VAT) | £460 |
| SIM-free supplier | www.carphonewarehouse.com |
| Contract/prepay supplier | www.o2.co.uk |
| Details | www.lg.com/uk |
| Part code | LG-H850 |
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