The LG G4, the phone we were excited for last year. And now, one year later, what's the G4 like to use? Welcome to the LG G4: One Year Later.
The G3 was a pretty incredible device when it launched in 2014. It was an incredible step from the LG G2 in design, hardware, camera and just overall experience. The LG G4 was a further refinement of the G3's philosophy with some added design and a slight revision to the software.
It all started with the LG G4's display. The G4 featured a 5.5-inch Quantum Dot QuadHD IPS LCD panel. It's one of the brightest and best-looking IPS panels in the game. And with a high pixel density, it also happens to be one of the sharpest as well. The G4 adopted a slightly different design as well. Some people claimed it looked like the OnePlus One when it first launched. And I must admit that from the front, it sure does.
Though LG's attention to their design was definitely a little different from the OnePlus One. Material selection was wider as well. For example, my vegetable oil stained leather back. It definitely made the phone look and feel different from the rest of the smartphone pack. However, we were disappointed to not see any premium metals on the G4; which was something we expected to see on the LG G3 in 2014.
Hardware-wise, the G4 was definitely off-centered from the rest of the Android flagship pack last year. Processor selection was the Snapdragon 808 processor, probably because the 810 was overheating at the time. 808 is a six-core unit and it was made into 3GB of RAM and 32GB of internal storage. LG elected to keep true to their expandable memory with the microSD card slot, which is mounted under the back cover right next to that removable battery.
Ah yes, the battery; something all power users thanked LG for keeping last year. The ability to remove a dead battery and swap it for a new one in only a few seconds. This was one of the biggest selling points for the G4 in my opinion. Though its performance definitely did attract a lot of people as well. Compared to the rest of the octa-core smartphone pack last year, the LG G4 definitely did perform well. It was fast enough to keep up with the more powerful on paper devices and it scored fairly well in most benchmarks.
And still to this day, the G4 is still performing just as smooth as it did when it first launched back then. I've never run into any issues while using the G4 throughout the past year and a lot of that is due to LG's skin. It's definitely not the most complex nor is it the most pleasing to look at but it's definitely one that is usable and functional. Not a whole lot of “look at me” features though there are a few outdated features such as QSlide; just things that I never use in the real world. But for the most part, the skin does keep a lot of the Android Lollipop features present and only adds LG customization to colors and themes throughout the OS and again, a perfectly usable operating system even to this day.
Now with the good stuff over, let's look at some of the bad stuff of the LG G4. For example, the software elements like Smart Bulletin still drive me crazy. Some of the colors throughout the UI just look cartoonish to me as well. Though we can't change those, we can only hope that the upcoming LG G5 can change that.