Welcome to the Daily Driver, a new series on PhoneDog that will feature devices I use as my daily driver. It’s meant to be a long term update, which means you can see multiple parts of these videos throughout each devices’ lifespan. And to start out today, we are going to choose the LG G4. You’ve seen plenty of G4 on this channel and a lot of you really like what the LG G4’s about. It literally took the G3 improved on as many things as they could and left alone the things that they already liked on the G3 and called it a day. Some of you might call that laziness but they still have a crazy good phone on their hands. So let’s go ahead and give you a refresher on the specs.

Starting out with that display. It’s the same 5.5-inch Quad HD IPS display but they added Quantum technology to increase the color spectrum. It’s definitely towards the top on our favorite displays of all mobile. Inside, they’ve bumped up the specs to a new Snapdragon 808 processor, which is now 6-cores, 3GB of RAM and the new Adreno GPU. It all means that the G4 is extremely powerful yet still very battery-efficient. The battery has remained at 3000mAh but one huge plus it’s still removable and swappable thanks to a removable back cover. The camera also gained 3MP and lost a 0.2 of an f-stop, making it more sharp and light-friendly. OIS has also been improved by adding the Y and Z axis and also laser autofocus was made more responsive than the last generation of the G3.

The overall design of the phone is also new. They drew inspiration from their G Flex 2 by slightly curving the G4 and they’ve also added new materials to the G4 portfolio. You can buy the G4 in plastic with diamond pattern back but I don’t think it looks that great. Now there is a solution to that. You can skin the phone and the folks over at Sleek Wraps have created a pretty sweet skin.

If you follow me on Twitter or any of my social networks, you know that I’m a huge fan of cars and anytime I see carbon fiber, I’m very intrigued. I sort of wish that everything in my house was made out of carbon fiber and now, this LG G4 is wrapped in a skin made to look like carbon fiber. And let’s be honest, it looks pretty dope. It has texture to it as well that almost (dare I say) feels like a pattern of actual carbon fiber plus the cut is really exact. And once you have the skin on the back, the buttons, the camera ring, the sides (top, bottom, and front) of the phone, you have one bad ass looking phone. I actually prefer the look of the carbon fiber-skinned LG G4 to the leather-backed G4. I’ll throw a link in the description where you can find these skins because you will most certainly have a few people asking you if the phone came like this from the factory.

Now to move into the software, which may be the G4’s weakest link but it doesn’t mean it’s bad. The G4 runs Android 5.1 Lollipop and has LG’s UX software. If you own or have used a G3 in the past, it looks and runs in exactly the same way. But its overall speed has increased but its functionality has basically remained the same. The startup lag is basically absent from this phone but the features like multi-window and QSlide don’t quite match up to the TouchWiz software. And it kind of feels like the G4 has a lot of wasted screen real estate and not all applications can take advantage of multi-window or QSlide. Also, the orientation of the software is still a little bit on the disorganized side of things, especially when you dive into the deeper parts of the settings.     

Now let’s take a look at the purpose of this video. This video is all about how the G4 performs as a daily driver. And the honest answer after about a month of usage is great. And I think that’s mainly down to a few things: number one is its level of comfort while using the phone thanks to its rear-button layout and the slight curve on the design. Number two is its long battery life and just the fact that I can swap out the battery if it does die. The third thing is it has an amazing camera and last but not least, its massive and beautiful enriching 5.5-inch display.

That sort of sums up the G4 experience as a daily driver. It’s really, really good and I highly encourage you to go try it out if you can. I’m definitely looking forward to the comments you have so make sure to leave them below.