LG G3 review - Great display, still no Android 5.0
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Specifications
The successor to this phone, the LG G4, is set to be announced on April 28th, so unless you absolutely have to renew your contract now with an LG G3, it might worth holding off on a purchase. It's likely the G4 will be priced similarly to the G3, but once the G4 becomes available, the price of the G3 may drop significantly and you could grab yourself a bargain.
The LG G3 is one of the best-looking phones we've ever seen. With its super-high-res 5.5in 2,560x1,440 IPS display and ultra-thin bezels, it's not only gorgeous to look at, but its simple, clean design also makes it supremely comfortable to hold.
Like its predecessor the G2, the G3 has its power and volume buttons on the rear of the phone, which takes some getting used to, but does mean you don’t press them accidentally when using the phone one-handed. We particularly like the G3's smooth, curved back, which fits perfectly in your palm. Its metallic finish isn't real aluminium as on the HTC One (m8), but it doesn't attract fingerprints and provides a decent amount of grip compared to the sometimes-slippery G2. We prefer the design to that of both the One (m8) and Samsung Galaxy S5, but it's the G3's screen that really makes it stand out from its competitors. The newly launched Galaxy S6 is giving it a run for its money, though, thanks to an overhauled design and a big boost in build quality, too.
With a resolution of 2,560x1,440, the G3 has a massive 3.68 million pixels crammed onto its 5.5in display, giving it an astonishing pixel density of 534 pixels-per-inch (PPI). To put that figure into perspective, a 5.5in phone with a 1,920x1,080 resolution would have just 2.07 million pixels and a PPI of 400. That's almost double the number of pixels in the same amount of space, giving the G3 a much crisper and clearer-looking screen than that of any other top-end smartphone.
Text was noticeably sharper on the G3 than on phones with Full HD displays, and we had no problem at all reading headlines and smaller body copy on web pages such as The Guardian and BBC News running in Desktop mode. Even Full HD phones force us to zoom in occasionally, but we felt no such need with the G3.
We measured the G3's black levels as 0.56cd/m2, which isn't particularly deep, but we found this made little difference to the clarity of text as the screen's high brightness of 417.32cd/m2 really makes letters stand out against its clean white backgrounds. Colours were also extremely bright and vivid thanks to the phone's high sRGB colour accuracy score of 91.7 per cent, and our measured contrast ratio of 741:1 led to plenty of detail in light and dark areas of images.
It's easily one of the best smartphone screens we've ever seen, but we did notice that the G3 wasn't able to sustain its maximum brightness setting during extended periods of use. Instead, the phone would gradually lower its maximum brightness level automatically, and wouldn't let us increase it again until the phone's internal temperature had cooled down. This was a little disappointing, but even though the G3 did get quite warm during every day use, it never got so hot that it was uncomfortable to hold and the brightness level rarely dropped below 90 per cent, meaning we could still use it outside in bright conditions without any trouble.
The Samsung Galaxy S6 screen arguably trumps the G3, though, with incredibly low black levels and sky-high brightness levels when outdoors, has the same resolution and covers 100% of the sRGB colour gamut. A year's worth of tech development has gone a long way, and the S6 definitely has the best smartphone screen out there at the moment.
Of course, one of the benefits of having such a large resolution screen is having a lot more workspace to play with, and LG has made the most of the G3's screen with its Dual Window app.
Like the Multi Window feature on current Samsung devices, Dual View lets you use two apps simultaneously, and you can adjust the height of each window to fit your needs. This means you can send a text while looking at Google Maps or browse the web while chatting to friends in Google Hangouts. Using apps in Dual Window can be a little cramped compared to using apps in full screen view, but it's great for multitasking and we much prefer it to continually going back and forth between different apps via the home screen.
Tweaks such as Dual View are probably the reason there's no Android 5.0 (Lollipop) update for the LG G3 yet. Such tweaks take time to migrate over to a new version of Android, and with Lollipop's significant reworking under the bonnet it's not a straightforward job. Despite being launched in other regions we're yet to see Android 5.0 on our LG G3 in the UK.
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