Very disappointing battery life per GSM Arena and audio performance with headphones is among the worst of all flagship phones released in the last 2 years. Those 2 are complete deal-breakers for me.
I spent a few minutes hands-on yesterday with the G4. Best Buy has demo units. I didn't mind the fit and finish...not a particularly sexy phone but adequate. I could live with it. Screen was good and I'm looking forward to moving on from the 4" screen on my iPhone 5. Couldn't try to the camera...the battery was dead when I got there and I didn't wait long enough for it to charge. LG's Optimus UI does nothing for me...don't really care for it. I much prefer the native Android UI that's available on the Nexus phones.
The Samsung rep that was in-store actually walked me through some of the differences between the LG and the S6. He wasn't pushy but asked what I had heard about the G4 that brought me into the store. I like the idea of having removable storage and he made some points about the performance between buying a phone with more native storage versus adding an SD card. He also said that it's less hassle to have a single bucket of storage, rather than what is basically a D: drive with the SD card.
At this point, I'm leaning heavily toward a 64 or 128GB S6 or S6 Edge. Camera is very solid and I also like it's security features. I know the iPhone 6 scores well there,too, but I'm done with Apple. My overall impression of the LG G4 was sort of meh. It's a nice phone but not particularly impressive, IMHO.
I'm pretty disappointed in all the recent flagships to be honest.
Hahahaha. I used the GPS the other day and ended up walking the opposite direction because I couldn't figure out which direction I was facing based on my Google Maps indicator.
Very disappointing battery life per GSM Arena and audio performance with headphones is among the worst of all flagship phones released in the last 2 years. Those 2 are complete deal-breakers for me.
Audio w/headphones:
"Unfortunately, plugging in our standard headphones caused quite a bit of distortion, bringing down the overall scores. The frequency response worsened a bit, intermodulation crept in and the amount of extra stereo crosstalk is higher than on other flagships. Add the fact that volume plummets to only average levels and you end up with a not particularly pretty picture. With the kind of competition it faces, the G4 won't be winning any extra points from audiophiles."
http://www.gsmarena.com/lg_g4-review-1254p7.php
Ironic that LG has a promotion in the US where it's giving away a 2nd battery, cuz well it desperately needs one! These results are consistent with the nearly identical LG Flex2 as well.
vs.
vs. Primary Android competitor is so much better in the WiFi/Web Browsing and video/media battery life.
I could deal with the increased thickness of nearly 10mm if the battery life was amazing but for a phone this much thicker than the iPhone 6/Samsung S6 to have inferior battery life is just unacceptable, especially since Snapdragon 808 is way slower than Exynos 7420 and there is no quick charger 2.0 that comes standard in the box!
I expected a lot better for $650.
Well, my G2 finally bit the dust. The screen was getting worse and worse, and now it's just a purple mess, can't see a thing.
I pre-ordered my AT&T G4 the other day, gonna take a chance on it. It sounds as though if you buy a G4 right now, LG is throwing in a second battery, a battery charger, and a 32GB microSD card too. Seemed like a decent deal. I hope the G4 is as sweet as all the reviews are making it sound.
Also, somehow I walked out of the AT&T store with an LG V410 tablet. $0.99 with a $10/mo device addon to my account.. Guess I was an easy mark that day.
I'll post my impressions when I get the phone.
I've got a G2 and a G4 sitting on my desk right now. I've recently divorced myself from Verizon and moved over to T-mobile. I've got a work line and a person one since I don't want to infect a personal device with Airwatch for work stuff. I work in a cellular dead zone and the wifi calling was very important.
I grabbed the G2 for $150 on an Ebay sale. It's a fantastic device. It's a great size, has amazing battery life and has some functional use to the skin/apps where Samsung's touch whiz stuff is just a pain in the ass. My main complaints are flaky bluetooth. It doesn't want to connect to my cars without a major fight. It also started getting grumpy with the lollipop update. Launching chrome just murders anything else running at the time.
For my other line I went with an S6 initially. It looked great, the camera was fantastic, and it was blazing fast to operate. Screen was also very nice. But there had to be some kind of bug with T-mobiles wifi calling and Samsungs lollipop build. The phone was using up close to 10% an hour just sitting on my desk doing nothing. I posted my results in the S6 Hype thread. I tried to tweak a bunch of different things but just couldn't get it to settle down.
So I sucked up the $50 exchange fee and took it back for the G4.
I've had the G4 for two days now and here's my initial thoughts....
- Tap to wake is a bit buggy. Some times you have to knock twice to wake it up. Double tap to sleep works almost every time. It's still a fantastic option and what really convinced me to look at LG again. I love it on the G2. I've learned that I hate physical buttons after being attached to them for years. Soft keys and gestures are just so much faster than physically pressing a button.
- Build quality has nothing on S6. The S6 is a sexy phone. It's solid, it's a slab of metal and glass. It's pretty. G4 is an unremarkable piece of plastic.
- Comfort in hand is a lot better than the S6. I'm coming from a Droid Turbo which the G4 is very similar in size to. I like the width in combination with the curved back vs. the thinness and height of the S6. I never felt like I could get a good handle on the S6 and was constantly scared I'd drop it. Not so with the G4. The S6 also being very narrow and having a lot narrower bezels I found that my palm was activating part of the screen edge and freaking the phone out. It almost needs some sort of palm blocking. Don't have that issue with the LG.
- Screen wise, the S6 is better. I like AMOLED. End of story. Better blacks, easier on my eyes, and I like the warmer colors it has. I'm not fond of LCD's in general on phones but that's what I have to work with. Oddly enough, I think I like the display on the G2 better. Colors don't feel as cold and harsh on it as the G4. Blacks also seem better. Both are set to auto brightness and it seems like the G4 backlight is pushing harder.
Battery life wise, it's a bit early to tell how good the G4 is. In standby my G2 is a beast. I've had over 30 hours of standby time with it. Very good for an Android device. I haven't had enough of a chance to put the G4 through the paces. What I can say is that it hasn't been nearly as bad as the S6 I had. I've been off the charger for 7 hours and streaming from wifi and celluar for 6 of that. An hour of screen time. Battery life is at 72 percent. And this is in an environment with zero cellular signal that has been rough on phones even with wifi calling. The S6 would have been at 30% at this point.
Camera wise I don't have enough experience with it to say much. It seems fast, although I'm annoyed with the quick wake of it. You can double tap the volume down to open it up, but when doing that it takes a picture that always ends up a blurred mess that you never intended to take. It still not as fast and doesn't appear to be as good as the S6 though. Definitely miss the camera action on the S6.
Response/speed wise the S6 is definitely faster. Menus loaded faster on it. Chrome absolutely FLEW on the S6. The G4 is definitely slower to navigate, browse and load. I do love having on screen/soft keys though for the G4. Plus having them in the place I expect them. Stupid Samsung and their back arrow being on the right hand side.
S6 was also a faster charger by a long shot. Could top it off in about 30 minutes. It's an hour for the G4. But swapping batteries is even faster yet
Audio wise I have no complaints on either one. Some sites blasted the G4's headphone output but I can't tell a difference. But I'm only using a $20 pair of Koss Porta Pro's. Not a $300 set of studio cans.
Overall I like it...I don't love it. It works better for me than the S6 due to the battery issues I had with the S6 and it's a size that works better for my hands. But it's not a device that elicits any major "ooooooh" moments. Samsung built a nice phone with the S6 and threw some major hardware at it. LG sort of feels like it's lost and not what it wants to do. I think the G2 is a better size format, the screen was perfectable acceptable and it's battery life is superior. It just needed to update it's camera a bit and up the materials quality. The G3 & G4 just felt like they were forced changes and added more screen size when it wasn't needed and the phone dimensions are too big for a lot of people without adding the functionality of something like the Note line.
The guys at the Tmobile stand thought I was crazy returning the S6. It was the first G4 they had sold (and this was on June 30th). They just can't get any interest in a phone that isn't Samsung or Apple.
LG is going to need to some soul searching on the G5. I think it will go the S6 route and be smaller and better built. And then a ton of marketing thrown at it.
T-mobile dropped these to 480 off contract. Not a phone techy so does that usually mean att follows suit?
I like that first shot a lotI've been pretty happy with the G4 camera, particularly in less than ideal lighting. These were all shot in "auto" mode and no flash in very dark environments. The camera did a decent job.
https://onedrive.live.com/?id=E46BB...2A&group=0&parId=E46BB480E134A82A!128&o=OneUp
https://onedrive.live.com/?id=E46BB...2A&group=0&parId=E46BB480E134A82A!128&o=OneUp
https://onedrive.live.com/?id=E46BB...2A&group=0&parId=E46BB480E134A82A!128&o=OneUp
The last one is blown glass art in the ceiling of the visitor's center at Maker's Mark distillery. It's in a very dark tunnel with the only light coming from behind the glass.
I've been pretty happy with the G4 camera, particularly in less than ideal lighting. These were all shot in "auto" mode and no flash in very dark environments. The camera did a decent job.
https://onedrive.live.com/?id=E46BB...2A&group=0&parId=E46BB480E134A82A!128&o=OneUp
https://onedrive.live.com/?id=E46BB...2A&group=0&parId=E46BB480E134A82A!128&o=OneUp
https://onedrive.live.com/?id=E46BB...2A&group=0&parId=E46BB480E134A82A!128&o=OneUp
The last one is blown glass art in the ceiling of the visitor's center at Maker's Mark distillery. It's in a very dark tunnel with the only light coming from behind the glass.