LG G3 review – is LG’s 2014 powerhouse worth a look in 2016?

18 months on, is the LG G3 worth buying in 2016? As smartphones go, it has actually held up remarkably well, and the flakey battery life is easily fixed by purchasing a spare as LG took the admirable decision to make the battery compartment accessible. 

The best thing going for it now though, is the price. At the time of writing you can purchase it for under £200 from Amazon which isn’t bad at all for a smartphone that still packs a punch in 2016. On contract, it can be had for as little as £15 per month.

We’re not far away from the LG G5, of course, and you could hang on and hope that the LG G4 sees a similar price drop – it’s already hovering around the £300 price point and a tempting proposition. Between the two is the OnePlus 2 – which has just had a very tempting price cut, placing it at £249. You can see a head to head between the G4 and OnePlus 2 here, and here’s the best smartphones you can buy in 2016.

Here’s the original review, so you can make up your mind.

LG’s flagship phone, the LG G3, may not be the most recognisable of names, but its headline specs place it right alongside the big hitters of 2014. With a huge 5.5in “Quad HD” display and a host of upgrades over its predecessor, the G2, the G3 is gunning for top-flight rivals from Samsung, HTC and Apple.

The big news is the display. LG has done away with the 5.2in Full HD panel on the G2, and replaced it with a gleaming, 5.5in, 2,560 x 1,440 IPS panel. It has four times the number of pixels than a 720p screen, which is where the Quad HD bit comes from, and first impressions are of unearthly levels of detail and luminous, saturated colours. The first time we snapped a picture with the rear-facing 13MP camera, we were blown away – it’s possible to see almost every speck of detail on the screen without zooming in. Visit: the best Android phones of 2014 too.

LG G3 review: design

Notably, the G3 squeezes its 5.5in display into a chassis that measures 74.5mm wide – a mere 3.6mm wider than the G2. It’s a big phone, but by no means unwieldy.

And LG has clearly been busily sprucing up its new handset. The rear looks like it’s crafted from brushed metal, but it’s actually 100% plastic. It doesn’t look or feel cheap, however: the rear arcs from edge to edge in single, gentle curve, and it’s framed by a sliver of flattened metal running around the handset’s edges. Combined with the smooth, semi-gloss rear, the G3 feels great in the hand.

It doesn’t suffer from the same fingerprint-snaffling qualities of glass-backed handsets, such as Sony’s Xperia Z2.

And, better still, after a month or so of use, it isn’t exhibiting much in the way of marks or scuffs. The LG G3 isn’t equipped with the same self-healing technology that allows its cousin the LG G Flex to magically recover from pretty serious scratches without a blemish, but all of the evidence so far suggests that in a year or two, the G3 will still look pretty good – as long as you don’t abuse it too much.

Indeed, even compared with the prettiest Android flagships out there – for our money, the Sony Xperia Z2 and the HTC One (M8) are the ones to beat – the G3 can hold its head up high. It doesn’t quite exude the same luxurious charm as those models, but, at only 149g, it’s pretty light for a 5.5in phone.

There’s little missing in the way of essentials, either. There’s 16GB of onboard storage, plus a microSD slot hidden behind the removable battery. Meanwhile, a silver grille on the G3’s rear conceals the phone’s 1W speaker; happily, this is crisp and loud enough to be useful for everything from playing a tune to fielding hands-free phone calls.

The one thing we’re not too keen on is LG’s signature, rear-mounted power and volume keys. These have also been given a little redesign – but alas not a rethink. After spending some time with the G3 we’ve come to the conclusion that these rear-mounted keys are simply impractical. Since the buttons aren’t visible from the front, there’s inevitably some degree of fumbling around to locate them, and we often found we had to adjust our hand position in order to operate the volume keys.

You might not think this would be a problem, but when holding the phone one-handed, any awkward grip readjustment brings the risk of a fumble and a potentially catastrophic drop. Not what you want when you’ve just spent this much on a smartphone.

LG G3 review: display

Technically, the LG’s display certainly has what it takes, though. Tested with our X-Rite i1 Display Pro colorimeter, the G3 reached a maximum brightness of 457cd/m[sup]2[/sup] and covered 91.4% of the sRGB colour gamut. It’s even moderately colour-accurate, with a Delta E of 2.57 indicating onscreen colours are fairly close to their intended shades. The only disappointment is the relatively low contrast ratio of 788:1; here the LG’s greyish black response is to blame. As a result, the G3 doesn’t dredge up quite the same level of detail in darker images and movie scenes as rivals with higher contrast ratios and better black levels.

In the main, however, the G3’s display is easily good enough to rival the rest of the Android big hitters. Generally, colours look warm and natural, if a tad undersaturated.

There is one problem, however: once the phone warms up, the display brightness is forcibly reduced to prevent overheating. This drops the screen brightness from the maximum of 457cd/m[sup]2[/sup] to 310cd/m[sup]2[/sup], which is far less legible in bright, sunny conditions. This won’t be a problem on a grey British summer day, but those using it hotter climes may face frustration.

After a few minutes, the brightness dims further, to 269cd/m[sup]2[/sup], although the indicated brightness percentage level doesn’t change. In short, it’s clear LG is having to employ aggressive power-saving measures to cope with the demands of the G3’s pixel-packed screen. Take a look at our LG G2 vs LG G3 comparison, too.

LG G3 review: software

LG has given Android 4.4.2 a new look and a variety of new features for the launch of the G3, but it hasn’t been butchered to the point where it’s almost unrecognisable (we’re looking at you, Huawei).

Instead, LG has kept the emphasis on making useful tweaks to the Android interface. The interface has been tweaked to employ simple, pastel-coloured shades, rounded icons and a variety of nifty page-turn transitions, which see the homescreens fold into one another and apps pirouette into the background.

Perhaps the first thing you’ll notice is LG’s Smart Notice widget, which is front and centre on the G3’s homescreen. It shows the time and a local weather forecast via AccuWeather, but also attempts to provide useful titbits of info: it prompts you to uninstall unused apps and return calls from contacts and occasionally advises you to dress appropriately for impending weather conditions.

LG has also bundled a variety of apps and widgets with the G3. Swipe left from the homescreen and the Smart Tips app gives a quick runthrough of the phone’s key features, while LG Health tracks your daily exercise levels; input your height, weight and age and the G3 tells you whether or not you’re overweight and suggests a daily target in steps. It’s also possible to track walking, running or cycling workouts via GPS and share the results.

The QuickMemo app – which allows you to capture and annotate screenshots – makes another appearance, but there’s also a Quick Remote app, which comes in handy if you lose the TV remote, and an improved Guest mode, which allows you to restrict the number of available apps and lock the handset via a password, a PIN, a pattern or LG’s Knock Code.

The Notification drawer has had a bit of a makeover, too. A customisable strip of round, scrollable buttons quickly toggles all the essential settings on and off, and the brightness control beneath makes it quick and easy to toggle automatic brightness or dim the screen for late-night use.

Our favourite feature, however, has to be the clip tray. This keeps a history of what you’ve copied to the clipboard – this could be text, photos or document files – and allowing you to select any recent copied item when you choose the paste option. It’s a very handy little tool.

Like Samsung’s recent handsets, the G3 also allows you to display two apps on screen simultaneously. Dubbed Dual Window, the mode is accessed via the phone’s Recent Apps screen and allows a selection of apps to be run simultaneously side by side. This works in both portrait and landscape orientations, and the split can be adjusted to suit. The QSlide feature, meanwhile, allows certain apps to be run as resizable floating windows: it’s possible, for instance, to have two split-screen apps in the background and have a third QSlide app floating on top. It’s a great demonstration of the power of the quad-core processor in the G3, but it isn’t particularly useful.

LG G3 review: Keyboard and security

The onscreen keyboard has had more than a few tweaks, too, leading LG to dub it the Smart Keyboard. The keyboard panel can be resized with a quick drag of the finger (although only in the Settings menu, not in apps themselves), while holding the space bar lets you swipe back and forth through typed text. Selecting appropriate autocorrect word suggestions is as easy as swiping a finger upwards towards the desired word. In practice, though, it’s no better than the stock Android keyboard, and certainly no match for Swype-style keyboards such as SwiftKey – if anything, we found ourselves making more errors on the LG keyboard.

As with most of the big smartphone launches of late, LG has pushed security features to the forefront. As mentioned, Knock Code makes a re-appearance. Unlike rival unlock screens, which provide visual onscreen lock patterns, this segments the G3’s blank screen into four quarters and allows you to unlock the phone with a sequence of finger taps. The benefit of this is obvious: it doesn’t leave tell-tale trails or finger presses on the screen, since you only need tap roughly in each of the screen’s quarters. It’s also possible to “knock” the phone into life by double-tapping the display, rather than reaching around the rear for the power button.

Another security feature is Content Lock. This makes it possible to secure photos, videos and personal files with 128-bit encryption. Even if files are visible when connected via a USB connection, it isn’t possible to preview or download them without entering the unlock code. The final safety net is the Kill Switch functionality, which can remote wipe or permanently disable the handset if you lose it.

There’s one area where LG has made a serious misstep, however. Despite its pixel-dense screen, an all-too-obvious image-sharpening filter is applied to onscreen content. Everything – including text, icons, webpages in the browser and even snaps taken by the camera – is fringed with halos.

This doesn’t have a huge impact in everyday use, but it’s difficult to ignore once you notice it, and in some circumstances it is a hindrance. When reading very fine black text against a white background, for instance, we found that the halos around the characters began to obscure the lettering itself. For this reason, we would appreciate the option to turn this off.

LG G3 review: hardware and performance

It comes as no surprise to find Qualcomm hardware powering the G3. It’s the same Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 CPU and Adreno 330 GPU pairing that we’ve seen on the frontrunners from HTC and Sony, but LG has joined Samsung in opting for the faster 2.5GHz version of the chip and packing in 3GB of RAM alongside. As you’d expect for a high-end handset, there’s not a hint of judder when flicking between the handset’s menus and homescreens.

Our usual suite of benchmarks saw the G3 complete the SunSpider test in 692ms, a result that puts it ahead of the Xperia Z2’s 920ms, narrowly behind the HTC One (M8)’s 590ms and well off the 391ms pace of the Samsung Galaxy S5. Oddly, performance in GeekBench 3 was around 19% behind all of its rivals, with a single-core score of 829 and a multi-core score of 2,205.

The G3 lagged behind its Full HD counterparts in our gaming tests, too. Although it has the same Adreno 330 GPU, the G3 has to power 77% more pixels. In the GFXBench T-Rex test, these extra pixels saw the LG manfully struggle to an average framerate of 19.9fps. It still has more than enough power to see off demanding Android titles, though; we only noticed a touch of jerkiness when the onscreen action really hotted up.

Behind the gorgeous metal-effect rear lies a 3,000mAh battery. This might sound a little worrying, given the demands of the pixel-dense screen and the powerful components inside, but LG claims to have tamed the battery life issue by employing adaptive frame-rate, clocking and timing controls for the Quad HD display. And, as we found in our display tests, it also subtly lowers the screen brightness at every opportunity.

In practice, LG’s tweaks seem to have been partly successful. In GFXBench’s battery test, which forces the display to 50% brightness, the G3 lasted 2hrs 58mins – a result that puts it only 11 minutes behind the long-lasting Xperia Z2. Much like the Samsung Galaxy S5, though, the G3 enhances its stamina in the GFXBench battery test by artificially limiting the average frame rate: despite averaging 19.9fps in the GFX Bench T-Rex performance test, it chugged along at only 12fps during the battery test, which simply loops the T-Rex test multiple times.

In our video rundown test, the G3’s high pixel count began to take its toll. With the screen brightness set to 120cd/m2 – 56% on the LG’s brightness control – the G3 consumed 9.1% of its battery capacity per hour; the Samsung Galaxy S5, Sony Xperia Z2 and HTC One (M8) used between 5.2% and 6.5%.

LG G3 review: camera

The G3 doesn’t trump last year’s G2 in the megapixel stakes – it’s still equipped with a 13MP sensor – but LG has added a variety of new features. First and foremost is the Laser+ autofocus system for taking quick-draw snaps. The increase in performance is obvious from the off. LG claim it takes only 0.276ms to focus on a subject, and we can believe it – crisp shots are captured almost instantaneously. The two-tone LED flash is another boon, delivering more natural, less washed-out lighting in low-light situations.

LG has also given its optical image stabilisation technology a boost, and it claims big performance benefits. Given the potential for split-second photo opportunities, we were largely pleased with the results. We took every opportunity to whip the G3 out for quick-draw snaps, and it turned out some great results. Despite its split-second focusing abilities, the G3 isn’t infallible – we still ended up with plenty of photos featuring a blurry subject framed by a pin-sharp background.

Overall, the G3 takes some cracking snaps. Blow them up on a big screen and it’s easy to spot the copious amounts of noise reduction and sharpening – and don’t forget that shots appear oversharpened on the handset due to the always-on sharpening filter – but they’re very good by smartphone standards. The 13MP sensor captures detailed snaps in good lighting conditions and doesn’t fare too badly when the lights go down, either.

As is de rigeur these days, the G3 also captures 30fps 4K video. Given enough pixels on your TV or PC monitor, the results are seriously impressive, with near-photographic levels of detail and even reasonably smooth motion.

The front-facing camera has had an upgrade, too, with a 2.1-megapixel sensor and f/2 lens taking centre stage. It can’t match the Huawei Ascend P7’s mighty 8-megapixel front-facing selfie camera, but it’s enough to keep pace with the bigger names in the smartphone arena. It’s more than capable of serving up unflatteringly detailed selfies when the occasion demands it.

LG G3 review: Verdict

On paper, the G3 looks like it’s got the chops to land some knockout blows on its premium smartphone rivals. In reality, though, we’re not convinced the pixel-packed screen is of any practical benefit; it’s more about one-upmanship than useful technological advancement. While the pin-sharp clarity makes a stunning first impression, LG has had to compromise screen brightness and battery life as a result.

Make no mistake: the G3 remains a good all-round handset, and we love the quick-draw camera, but with the HTC One (M8) and the Samsung Galaxy S5 delivering a more balanced all-round performance for similar money, this isn’t the Android giant-killer we’ve been waiting for.

Details
Cheapest price on contract	Free
Contract monthly charge	£32.00
Contract period	24 months
Physical
Dimensions	74.6 x 8.9 x 146.3mm (WDH)
Weight	149g
Touchscreen	yes
Core Specifications
RAM capacity	3.00GB
Camera megapixel rating	13.0mp
Front-facing camera?	yes
Video capture?	yes
Display
Screen size	5.5in
Resolution	1440 x 2560
Landscape mode?	yes
Other wireless standards
Bluetooth support	yes
Integrated GPS	yes
Software
OS family	Android