Gadgetory

we've already found that LG g3 is one of the best smartphones of the year no question about it but now we have a stateside model to take a look at I'm Taylor Martin this is PocketNow and this is our review of the AT&T LG g3 back in June our own michael fisher covered LG's latest flagship in excruciating detail in a nearly 10 minute long video we could do that again with this AT&T specific version but we'd be repeating many of the same sentiments and said we'll cut to the chase and cover the important differences the good and the bad of 18 t g3 and we'll be sure to fill you in on the details we admitted with the south korean variant first off from the outside you won't see a ton of visual differences on the AT&T variant of the g3 like before it comes in two color options silk white and metallic black of course we got the black model once again with a brushed metal esque finish around back speaking of the back side the designs are identical but the branding has been swapped out a TN t--'s globe is positioned just below the rear mounted buttons and LG's insignia has been traded for the g3 implement other than that these phones are tit for tat even on the inside we were surprised to learn the AT&T variant would also come with 32 gigabytes of storage and three gigabytes of RAM instead of two and all the rest of the innards are the same as well the Snapdragon 801 SOC with a quad-core Krait 400 CPU clocked at 2.5 gigahertz and Adreno 330 GPU a 3000 milliamp hour removable battery microSD card slot with support for up to 128 gigabytes Wi-Fi 802 a Levin AC NFC etc it's all there except one thing and this sort of gets under our skin the AT&T model does not come with Qi wireless charging we know it seems ridiculous but AT&T support for the PMA standard means that unlike other g3s who can't simply plop this phone down on a chi or PMA charging plate to charge it no need to call up the extra cash for a quick circle folio with PMA embedded yet another $60 and it's only available through AT&T and no research tells us you cannot simply buy a Qi replacement battery door for your AT&T g3 to magically get cheap back it's gone and that's truly unfortunate safer wireless charging and proper band support for AT&T here in the States there are no major Hardware change and that's a very very good thing this is before we're super pleased with the g3 hardware and don't be alarmed about the complaints about the display there petty at best contrast and saturation can be tweaked in the accessibility settings and the lower than usual brightness may fix some users but it's not drastically dimmer than your run-of-the-mill smartphone display the software situation is also much of the same it's a solid balance of simplicity and user customizability things like the customizable navigation buttons and NOC code give it just enough personality to separate it from the rest and somehow LG manages to pack a ton of options and features into its software without bogging anything down or making the UI difficult to navigate and tweak that is if you don't use the task switching menu on the flip side AT&T has made some very subtle changes were not exactly fond of first and foremost bloat AT&T branded applications are in abundance approximately 22 come pre-installed and long pressing and dragging any of these over to the remove function doesn't uninstall set apps but rather disables them worse than that two changes have been made in the notification shade and we're torn over the change no longer are the brightness and volume sliders permanently displayed below the quick settings toggles instead you get to toggle buttons for the brightness settings and sound profile this helps reduce the clutter in the shade but also makes accessing brightness and sound settings or cumbersome especially considering where the volume buttons are located fortunately everything else is still intact and this carrier version comes running Android 4.4.2 just like the South Korean edition like before performance is a buttery smooth no matter whether you're pushing the phone to its limits with an intense game like the new modern combat 5 or browsing the web and Chrome and playing a YouTube video at the same time the Snapdragon 801 keeps trucking along without issue as expected these findings are corroborated by synthetic benchmarks and it's impressive scores all you need to know in terms of performance is the LG g3 is a beast last time we emitted call quality and network performance call quality this time was remarkably clear we had no trouble hearing those on the other end earpiece and speakerphone were plenty loud even in noisy environments and callers reported no trouble hearing us in the same conditions network speeds have been awesome even in weak HSPA+ coverage areas we mustered speeds upwards of 5 megabits per second down and 1 megabit per second up peak downlink speeds were over 40 megabits per second and our peak uplink speed was over 16 megabits per second better life is also something we were concerned about considering the 5.5 inch 1440p display in Snapdragon 801 through our usage the removable 3000 milliamp hour battery managed to powers through a full day on a single charge which is saying something the battery did tend to plummet and to specific and obvious scenarios with the display brightness at 100% and or in heavy gaming in such cases the phone would heat up and you could physically see the battery wilt way before your eyes but in typical usage the g3 stamina is impressive the camera performance like before is hit or miss and great lighting you won't find much better but the optical image stabilization at least for low-light shots doesn't appear to have any effect on the light intake low-light shots are washed out blurry and filled with noise but as far as we can tell there are no differences in this area so no surprise this version of the g3 is just as awesome as the first one we looked at AT&T made some changes some we don't exactly agree with but the core and highlights of the phone are still intact the display is still just as gorgeous the performance is top-notch and the software is dare I say enjoyable and we can't argue with its pricing either one $99.99 on a two-year agreement or five $79.99 without 18 G's added touch that is if you don't count the bloatware is also nice theta speeds and call quality have been fantastic still we wish they'd left the Qi wireless charging alone and hadn't needlessly tweaked the software if you're on AT&T you want to taste at the best of the best the LG g3 is the real deal and totally worth the Buy folks thanks for watching and if you enjoyed this video I'm gonna help us out be sure to click the thumbs up button below and subscribe to the channel to see more videos like this one in the future be sure to follow us in all the usual places Twitter Facebook and Google+ at pocket now I'm Taylor Martin you can find me on twitter at casper tech and i will see you next time