Gadgetory

hey what is up guys in cabbie HD here and the LG g4 has been killing it this is LG's big and bright and slightly curved flagship smartphone for 2015 for most of my phone reviews you'll notice it's pretty much a combination of the pros and the cons about the device the pros being things that I really like about it and then the cons being the list of things that I think could be a little bit better and going through all the things I've written down and all the notes I have about the g4 during my time using it it's mostly pros there's not a lot that's wrong with this phone at all and it pretty much checks all the boxes in terms of things you'd want to see in a high-end smartphone anyway let's get into it first of all on the spec sheet the g4 is high-end all the way across the board you saw at the date was announced so it's rocking a six-course Snapdragon 808 chip 3 gigabytes of RAM and it benchmarks a little bit lower than that Snapdragon 810 but that's not a big deal definitely still an excellent performer and the rest of the components like the display and the battery and the camera as you'll see in a second are top of the line too but let's start with the build since this was actually my least favorite part of the phone it has a 5.5 inch display so it's kind of a big phone and it's slightly curved so not flexible curved like the LG G flex 2 and it grew its forehead back from the g3 which had those trademarked much thinner bezels so I'm saying the g4 is not the prettiest phone in the world but material choices are decent so you get a glossy metal sides and you can get it with a variety of different backs but that I have here is the plastic one LG says this is a plastic infused with metal but I can't really tell so I'm just gonna call it plastic and it has a sort of a diamond pattern to it that you can feel when you rub your hand on it there's another back material that's ceramic a bit heavier and a bit smoother but with the same diamond pattern and there's also a bunch of leather ones which actually look really nice and although I don't know how durable they are I still think I would prefer those over this plastic but either way even if you don't get the back color you like you don't need to sell it or return it because the g4 is part of an endangered species of smartphones that still have a removable back so you can remove the back and replace it or use any of the other ones you can switch between them and underneath that removable back you have access to a removable 3000 milliamp hour battery and a micro SD card slot for expandable storage so that will make some people really happy also LG kept all the buttons on the back of the phone so there are no buttons on either side it's nice and clean and you have some slightly improved more tactile buttons I think they're a little bit more separated and the power volume up and volume down really easy to press and easy to get used to I actually found myself reaching for back buttons on other phones after using this one now around the front of this phone is a 5.5 inch quad HD display again it's not an OLED display like Samsung but it's what LG calls a quantum IPS display not to be confused with an actual quantum dot display found in some new TVs but they do promise it'll bring some deeper contrast blacker blacks and better overall color and yeah pretty much any way you painted this display looks awesome it gets very bright not quite as bright as the galaxy s6 again outdoors but it's close and of course it's super sharp and very vibrant and colorful and beautiful and curved and just enough to make a difference when you're holding it up to your face if you still make phone calls so it might not be the dis best display in any smartphone I'm still gonna hand in that crown to the galaxy s6 but the g4s panel provides a fantastic media experience if only it weren't paired with a bottom rear-facing not that great easy to cover speaker it's kind of loud but it really does the display a disservice whether you're watching your team dominate during the regular season or watching them crumble to an epic postseason collapse so when it comes down to actually using this phone we're rockin android 5.1 with LG's UI on top the software experience is sort of like a refined version of what we had on the g3 it's a little bit cleaned up a little bit smoother and it adds a few pretty useful features actually some of them notably copied from rivals but hey at least they copied the good stuff I personally still prefer stock Android over this skinned version but that's mostly for aesthetics and for a lot of people that matters less and there are a bunch of neat features in here to make the g4 worth more so for example besides the few pre-installed apps and widgets you get that resizable LG keyboard which i think was pretty underrated with the g3 last year so if you have smaller hands you can shrink the keyboard down to match or bigger hands you can make the keyboard bigger if also brought in Samsung's dual window you can take advantage of that whole five and a half inch display by multitasking with apps that support this again it's not something I use very often but it's still neat to see even if we've seen it before it works pretty well they also have these new smart features which use context like location and connectivity status to basically automate stuff so I have mine set up for example to open Spotify every time I plug my headphones in which is pretty convenient and you can have a change and open things like when it connects to your home Wi-Fi or when you turn bluetooth on etc and then everything else in LG's launcher is pretty smooth and clean I mean again it's not as clean as stock Android but it's a definite improvement and I noticed things like you know the super wordy version of the weather in the stock weather widget again like instead of the temperature I get a paragraph or the settings I still think are downright ugly they've organized it really well and it's helpful but any menu that needs the scrolling text was probably not planned very well but honestly that's just nitpicking and performance throughout this version of Android on the g4 has been extremely solid gaming great web browsing has been very smooth on Chrome multitasking with a bunch of apps open the g4 handled pretty much everything as it should with three gigabytes of RAM now on to the battery life of the LG g4 like I mentioned earlier it has a removable back so the easiest quickest way to replace her charge is to just crack it open take the battery out and replace it with a fresh one that you've charged somewhere else that's the easiest way to get your charge back and that's only possible because it's a removable backed phone now when we first got the announcement we also heard that it did not support Qualcomm quick charging and did not support wireless charging since that video one of those things has changed it's gotten an update now where it does support Qualcomm's quick charging so that's pretty nice so you have battery swap available you have quick charging available still no wireless charging but the battery life of the phone itself with this 3000 milliamp hour battery is great I've been getting great standby time and great on screen time so I typically average around 4 hours of screen on time with the quad HD display and all of its great performance and also standby time was really good so I would go to sleep unplugged at 100% and I would wake up with 98 percent battery left which is great you don't see that from every phone so I'm happy to say that the g4 has been great in any aspect of battery life even though it does get a little bit warm sometimes even though it does have a really high-resolution really big display there have been no problems and it lasted me all day every day now on to the camera on the back of the g4 since this thing has launched this camera has been one of the most talked about one of the most impressive features to a lot of people this has been the thing that's blowing more people away than anything else and rightfully so on paper we're looking at a 16 megapixel one over two point six inch sensor with a wide open F 1.8 aperture which is the widest on any smartphone so far and an LED flash that you'll hopefully never have to use also to the left of the sensor is your laser autofocus for fast and accurate focusing and to the right under the flash is a new color spectrum sensor for fast and accurate white balance the camera software itself is pretty clean so you can double tap the volume down button on the back of the phone when it's off to open the camera but I wish it didn't take a photo every time I did that but when you open it you can see the auto mode looks like any other smartphone camera a separate button for photos or 4k video quick focus thanks to the laser autofocus and tap to focus and meteor work pretty well overall it's pretty easy to use for anyone who's trying to set it up but then the g4 has a few tricks up its sleeve first is the new manual mode similar to the galaxy s6 and it's pro mode here you can choose everything just like a DSLR from ISO to white balance to shutter speed to the manual focus distance and dial in that perfect shot and then there's even a toggle to switch to shooting RAW images which you can actually take into Lightroom or Photoshop and tweak the data yourself just like with a DSLR shot so that's really impressive so on to the actual images on a beautiful quad HD viewfinder it's easy to be very impressed by the crispy photos the g4 takes there's tons of detail great colors even pretty decent dynamic range which is impressive for a smartphone camera but yeah bringing them into a computer and inspecting them actually that left me more impressed pretty much every photo I took was clean and intact sharp focus and it very quickly became one of those cameras that made me want to just go out and take more photos of things just encouraged me to point and shoot in auto mode and it did a killer job also the optical image stabilization had me taking way more low-light shots and a did great job with those two dynamic range was wide enough to keep those photos looking pretty balanced even in more extreme situations and the O is kept shots crispy no matter what the conditions basically what I'm saying is it's very hard to complain about anything about the G for camera but I do have something just one little nitpick as much as we love crispy shots the g4 does actually over sharpen a little bit the same way Samsung phones did one or two years ago take this shot for example I took the same photo on both the Galaxy s6 camera which you I've talked about that phone a lot in this video and the LG g4 camera both shots looked fantastic on the phone's display but inspecting them both on the computer and zooming in the g4 photo was so much sharper than the galaxy s6 is to the point where I thought I actually missed focus with the s6 camera but I didn't the g4 just sharpens the image a lot more on post-processing so you can see it's crispier but it's not actually showing any more detail the issue is a little easier to see here in this photo so the gnome is in focus but some of the flowers aren't supposed to be but if you zoom in and look at those flowers you can see they're still processed in a way that kind of tries to find detail and crunch into focus things that aren't not a huge deal especially when most people never zoom in on their smartphone photos anyway but this is something that can be adjusted in a software update and I think that's what we'll see otherwise though don't let me ending on that note give you a bad taste this is easily one of the best cameras in any smartphone on the g4 and I might not be able to replace your DSLR like LG might want you to think it does but damn we might need to have another top smartphone cameras comparison pretty soon oh and if you're wondering it also has a front-facing 8 megapixel selfie camera in case you're into that so overall at the end of the day the g4 is an awesome phone in a lot of ways I think my biggest problem with it was just aesthetics like I didn't think it was a prettiest phone I really like the way the g3 looked with the super thin bezels on the sides and the top the g4 I think is a little more boring in my opinion maybe if I had the leather version I'd be a little bit happier about the way it looked but not a huge fan of the plastic not huge fan of the sides that are kind of metallic but still kind of slippery but otherwise it's an awesome phone like the camera the performance the battery life the specs just the hardware in general it's an awesome phone in pretty much every other way to use and I think you'll be happy with it it's especially if you like the g3 this is gonna be an awesome phone to pick up so yeah that's hope you enjoyed this video review of the LG g4 thank you for watching and if you enjoyed it feel free to give it a thumbs up below and hit that subscribe button if you haven't already to see more videos like this again thanks for watching and talk to you guys the next one bass