on the surface the LG G5 has everything
smartphone enthusiasts have been asking for so why is it then that I didn't like
it is it possible that LG didn't pay
enough for a positive review or hear me out on this is it possible that dbrand
provides all of our phones anyway and that I am capable of forming opinions
all on my own let's find
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spec-wise it's pretty hard for LG to have gotten this wrong with mediatech
still playing catchup and Intel having seemingly bowed out of the smartphone
processor race for now Qualcomm is pretty much the only choice at the
moment unless your name is Apple so a Snapdragon 820 processor clocked at 2.1
5 GHz on the faster cores paired with an adreno 530 GPU Beats at its heart in
line with Halo SKS from other manufacturers the G5 packs 4 gigs of
ddr4 memory 32 gigs of onboard storage
with micro SD expansion and Corning Gorilla Glass 4 on its Quad HD or
2560x1440 resolution 5.3 in panel it's
also got Wireless AC and LTE Advanced
for Wicked connectivity Android marshmallow yellow and it's available in
a variety of colors including pink with a 3,000 is milliamp battery actually
2800 milliamp hours to be precise but in
spite of these similarities there are a great number of differences between the
G5 and the Galaxy S7 from LG's fellow
Korean rival Samsung that need to be addressed we'll begin with performance
the G5 performs about like you'd expect 4 and 82 20 maybe a little better my
usual run geek bench until it hurts throttling test gave it only a 10% gap
between its top score and its bottom scores a very favorable result next up
is the screen it tickles me to no end the way that LG's TV division
is beating the OLED drum with Samsung
positioning Quantum do LCD as the top technology of today citing concerns
about maximum brightness and burning while Samsung's mobile division has been
pimping OLED for years at this point and LG is still using LCD the truth of the
matter in spite of the clear flip-flopping even within the same
freaking company is that there are just tradeoffs to be made either way the s7's
OLED screen saves enough power for it to have an always on clock feature and
gives it astonishing readability in direct sunlight at the cost of some
color oversaturation while the g5s IPS
LCD screen boasts more true to the original content colors great viewing
angles without the weird color shift of some oleds at extreme angles and
shockingly an always on clock with notifications too that thanks to their
displays surprisingly solid blacks manages to look almost as good as the
s7s unless you're in a really dark room where you can see that all the pixels
are back lit and doesn't even manage to drain the battery life anymore so full
marks for the screen and a bonus point
for the subtle curve at the top that makes the phone slide onto your face a
little more gracefully and actually makes it so that pulling down your
notification tray is a little bit smoother too this is the first
application of curved phone glass that feels purely functional to me as opposed
to a mostly just because we can sort of
thing above the screen is a mediocre 8
megapixel f2.0 selfie camera that that
thankfully doesn't share the s7s makes my nose look huge fisheye lens but
otherwise doesn't really blow me away then at the bottom of the screen below
the on screen only no physical buttons is not one not two but three of the big
features of the G5 first up is the
bottom firing speaker that delivers marvelous 5.1 surround sound in spite of
its no I'm just kidding the G5 suffers
from cup syndrome which is curious unfortunate placement
just like the top two smartphones right now I talking of course rather about the
reversable more durable Quick Charge 3.0
equipped USB type-c connector bye-bye
microe don't let the door hit your ass on the way out two the fact that
pressing this little catch on the bottom causes that 2800 milliamp battery to
slide right out allowing it to be changed once it wears out without a
fancy toolkit or even throughout the day as needed and three the way that the
bottom charging module here disconnects from the battery allowing it to be
replaced with other modules so dbrand
who as I mentioned provided our skinned G5 here sent us the camera one to get a
feel for what that's like and basically it's pretty stupid so far uh I
had it on for a day before I realized that it's thick awkward to hold unless
you happen to be taking a picture and aside from the extra battery capacity
something that I could get with a sleeker battery case for most phones
contributes absolutely nothing to the usability of the device it's a glorified
hand grip and shutter button on a phone
whose camera forced me to stop using it
earlier on in my daily use review cycle
than I normally would I mean to be clear
the camera isn't unusable or anything and it would be a huge upgrade If You're
Still rocking a Nexus 5 or something but when I'm coming from the Galaxy S7 or an
iPhone 6s it is a significant kick in
the balls there's no gesture to launch
something that everyone not just Motorola and Samsung needs by the way
the low light performance everything from dimly lit without Flash to very
dark and Flash assisted frankly blows
chunks in comparison look at the shot of my family in a hotel room compared to
the iPhone 6s and video recording is a
solid me and on top of all that the G5
isn't waterproof I mean I know it's not advertised anywhere as being waterproof
but it is amazing how much more likely I am to use my camera to capture an
awesome moment when it's water resistant launches faster and takes better
pictures this tradeoff for a removable battery and being able to install
modules like a clipon shutter button is a horrible one for me personally one
that isn't helped by LG's Android skin this time around I'm not going to hate
on the lack of an app tray believe it or not and I even like some of LG's flare
double tap to wake is wonderful and I didn't realize how much I missed it
until I had it again and the addition of a recently uninstalled apps button is
actually kind of cool let you reinstall them with like one touch but management
of hiding apps something that you need to do since your home screens are also
your app drawer now could be better I wish I could just drag them to a hide on
the top of the screen after I long press or and then uninstall on the other side
rather than digging through a settings menu for some inexplicable reason
creating folders doesn't intelligently suggest a name as it does on other
phones available even with the Android operating system so I'm not sure how
they missed that and it doesn't even let you start typing right away clustered
notification cards sometimes I'm actually not sure if I'll be able to
recreate this on camera but they sometimes like Clump up when I try and
expand them making them them hard to read and the rear lock button with
fingerprint sensor while reasonably fast and easy to reach while holding the
phone in my hand ended up being kind of a pain whenever the phone was resting on
the desk next to me something that happens quite a bit since I use a
password protected lock screen both Sony and Samsung's implementations and Apple
for that matter are better here with a fingerprint sensor on the side or on the
front which I guess leads us pretty perfectly into the conclusion there's
nothing about the G5 that makes me say what the hell were they thinking like
OnePlus neglecting to include NFC on the OnePlus 2 it's got a feature set that
isn't wrong some folks are going to buy it just for the IR emitter and there's
no right answer between swappable battery versus water resistance it's
just not the mix that I want for myself
and that combined with the only pretty good camera awkwardly positioned touch
sensor lack of wireless charging and high price make it hard for me to
recommend it in a world where the iPhone 6s and the Galaxy S7
exist speaking of existing you know what exists dbrand they make high quality
vinyl skins for your device which is to
say if your device is one of the devices that they make skins for they've got
support for iPhones Android phones actually a wide variety of Android
phones and even computers including MacBooks and some SEL PCS like Dell's
XPS lineup and the best thing about dbrand is you can use their configurator
to set up your device to look exactly the way you want whether you want wood
grain finish like this laptop here the XPS 15 we reviewed whether you want a
sexy matte black like you saw on the G5 that I reviewed today or whether you're
completely colorblind with no sense whatsoever and you want a you know
multicolored iPhone SE that makes people go
like ew when you walk past them while
you're talking on it so check out dbrand.com we've got it linked in the
video description customize your device the way that you want and order because
they're affordable and they ship
worldwide so thanks for watching guys if this video sucked you know what to do
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video descript deson now that you're done doing all that stuff you're probably wondering hm what should I
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