LG G5 review: A flexible smartphone, but usurped by newer models

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.