Reviewed by Kinan Jarjous (twitter: @JarOfJuice)
The LG G2 is Optimus G’s successor, boasting an incredible set of specs that push it well beyond the competition. However, while the G2 achieves in numbers, it falls short in other aspects making it feel a rather unpolished product that has missed out on its full potential.
The Build Quality
The G2 is quite an oddball. The phone’s face is a gorgeous, high quality screen that maximizes the real estate given by the phone. Flip the phone and you’ll be greeted with a cheap, yet sturdy, polycarbonate with your volume and power buttons packed in neatly underneath the camera.
It’s certainly the most peculiar arrangement and will require conscious cerebral effort on your part to adapt your motor skills to it. The placement of the volume buttons on the back could make sense during a phone call, where the index finger naturally falls within range; however, adjusting the volume while watching videos or playing a game is an exercise in dexterity. Having the power button wedged between the volume buttons would often result in many scenarios where the phone would switch off. The phone forces you to carefully plan your gaming and video sessions by adjusting the volume at the very beginning in hopes that no further adjustments are necessary.
Despite it being a big phone, though, it is very light and feels comfortable in the hand.
The Screen
The screen is beautiful, crisp, gorgeous, and responsive — there is also a distinct “oily” feel to the coating that makes flicking through menus or sliding keyboards a real treat. There are two issues I had, however — one being subjective and the other more of a technical irk.
The first revolves around the white balance. Placed next to the iPhone and the HTC, the white is certainly a purer white; the iPhone and HTC render warmer whites. That said, the G2’s white does feel cooler than normal, and this makes reading at night uncomfortable.
The second issue is that of auto-brightness; it just doesn’t work. On other phones, you could switch auto-brightness on and adjust the overall level of brightness with the slider. The G2 simply refuses to comply; if the slider is at 100% and the auto-brightness is on, it remains at 100%. If you lower it to 85%-99% it substantially dims, and lowering it any where below 60% will throw your auto-brightness into disarray. The best combination is to have auto-brightness on within the upper 15% or have it on manual brightness.
The UI
Where the phone loses its identity the most is in the UI. If it feels familiar, then you’re right: it looks very similar to a silver version of Samsung’s TouchWiz. In fact, the keyboard, email, and SMS apps feel all too familiar.
What makes the UI fail, though, is the jarring inconsistency. The notification menu tries to be elegant, but takes up too much real estate with toggles (some of which you can remove to reclaim horizontal real estate). Open the SMS app and you’ll find a revolting, childlike interface that is incomprehensibly bewildering. The dialer app, while not bad as it is, sports big, blocky buttons with a different colour palette and design than the rest of the phone. The button layout on the email app is nonsensical: why have the reply button so out of reach in the upper right corner?
Though the SMS, dialer, and email apps could be replaced (the email alternatives are not that better), the most inexcusable design flaw involves text alignment in folder menus; app names are often truncated and continued on a second line. The UI feels unpolished overall.
The Camera
If there is one thing that truly stands out in the G2, it is the camera: simply phenomenal. The amount of detail the 13MP sensor picks up is staggering. The lens is very capable in macro focus, opening doors to a different world of photography. The default exposure controls are fantastic, ensuring that all parts of the photo are properly exposed, even in outdoor photos involving a lot of sky. The night mode is very good, but suffers high levels of softness as a result of removing noise with processing. The front camera, on the other hand, is awful, so you’re better off taking selfies with the rear camera.
The Conclusion
The G2 is a strange device which tries to be everything but ultimately falls victim of its own grandeur. It rips off many pages from Samsung, from the UI to bloating up the software with features and apps that are mostly gimmicks. Despite having a rock solid foundation of technical specs and a fantastic camera, it ultimately loses its identity and becomes a shadow of what it could be thanks to software design flaws.
