I'm saying a little bit-the LG benchmarked similarly to other top phones, but I was surprised it didn't do better.
That led to nearly sixteen hours of talk time, also the best battery life result we've seen in a phone this size.Īndroid, Performance and SkinThe G2 is the first phone we've tested with Qualcomm's new quad-core, 2.27GHz Snapdragon 800 processor, but Android 4.2.2 with LG's skin looks like a little bit of a drag here. LG has its own battery chemistry department, which lets it include a 3000mAh cell, the biggest we've seen in a phone this size. When I got AT&T LTE service, I saw some of the fastest speeds I've gotten in Manhattan-more than 30Mbps down-but there was a catch, in that at one point, the phone couldn't climb up from HSPA to LTE and needed to be bumped into Airplane Mode to locate the network again.
It connected to a 5GHz Wi-Fi 802.11n network without a problem, as well as to a Plantronics Voyager Legend Bluetooth headset, including activating voice dialing. It has Bluetooth 4.0, Wi-Fi 802.11ac, GPS and NFC.
It supports AT&T's LTE network, as well as AT&T's and foreign HSPA networks. The G2 is kitted out with all the latest wireless technologies. "Where can I get Mexican food near here?" gave me "My favorite one is electricity." "Show me reviews of the LG G2 smartphone" gave me "No call logs apps found." I'd stick with dialing here. Basic voice dialing worked fine, but free-text queries resulted in answers ranging from irrelevant to weird. While Voice Mate advertised voice activation from the lock screen like the X has, I just couldn't get that to work. I found LG's Voice Mate voice assistant disappointing after using Google Now on the Moto X. The phone's noise cancellation worked, but introduced a slightly staticky tone that I also heard in transmissions through the speakerphone, which is of middling volume. The earpiece is loud enough, although transmissions over the AT&T network sounded a bit fuzzy on the other end. Voice Quality and Battery LifeSignal strength is very good on the LG G2, but the Samsung Galaxy S4 has better voice quality. That said, I still prefer the physical button on the Galaxy S4. There are no physical buttons on the front face of the phone, and you can customize the virtual home and menu buttons to "right-handed" or "left-handed" order. A colored LED above the screen blinks with notifications. Colors are truer and a bit less saturated than on the Galaxy S4's OLED.
The G2's bright, 1080p IPS LCD screen is just lovely. The phone is encased in shiny, but fortunately not unpleasantly slippery, plastic. The battery isn't user replaceable, and there's no memory card slot the only visible ports are the micro USB port and headphone jack, both on the bottom panel. This isn't the case with all the carrier models, by the way: The Verizon model's buttons are harder to use without looking. I mostly woke up the phone by tapping twice on the screen, something LG calls "knock-on." (It worked about 80 percent of the time sometimes, it took four taps.) Liberated from having to find the power button between the volume buttons, I could just focus on the volume controls, which are easy to find by touch. So how about those rear-mounted buttons? They aren't too bad-on this model.
The result is a handset that still feels like it's phone-sized, but with the largest possible screen. That said, it's a tiny bit wider than the GS 4 at 2.8 inches, and genuinely too wide for me to consider a one-handed phone the 2.57-inch Moto X fits much more naturally in my hand. How, you ask? By making the screen nearly bezel-free, and throwing the volume and power controls.
Physical FeaturesThe LG G2 manages to get a 5.2-inch screen in roughly the same form factor as the Samsung Galaxy S4, with its 5-inch display.