LG G3 review

"We love Steve Jobs, but he was wrong."
That was the battle cry from LG's head of smartphone planning, Dr Ramchan Woo, when talking about the screen on the new LG G3, a step upwards in terms of screen resolution.
He said that Apple had got it wrong; that the average user needs 500+PPI to appreciate the sharpness of a good phone screen, in the same way that art books offer a crispness to fully feel the pictures.

The screen is the dominating factor in an improved chassis

Where most phones you'll have seen are now running Full HD 1080p screens, LG has now stuffed a huge amount more pixels into the display. A 5.5-inch offering with a 2560 x 1440 resolution means a 538PPI sharpness is something you won't have seen if you haven't headed into the Chinese market recently.
But the LG G3 is more than just a new screen. It's an overhauled UI, a revamped design and a complete effort to simplify everything.
I can't state how much this was needed – the LG G2 was a powerful beast that tried to do everything at once, and it ended up in a complete mess in terms of the user interface.
The design language of the G2 was fairly muted, a glossy anonymous phone that only was differentiated from the rest of the competition by the rear-mounted power and volume buttons.

The back buttons are much more refined

The LG G3 is a step forward in nearly every way – from the overhauled 'Floating arc' design to the updated user interface LG thinks its found a solution to a number of the problems that have prevented it being as critically acclaimed.
And the result: it's fallen somewhere in the middle. The G3 is a much better phone than anything LG has put out before, but it's still favouring function over ease of use in a number of cases.
It should be noted that the sample I was given was from the Korean pre-production line; as such the performance is not at the level LG will ship with in June.
The design is updated in a big way – the back is now a fusion between metal and plastic. LG is calling this a 'metallic skin' – a film within the polycarbonate shell that allows it to have a premium feel with the connectivity power of a plastic casing.
The G3 partly achieves this. It's a definite evolution over the G2, and it's much more premium-feeling than the likes of the Samsung Galaxy S5. However, it's not in the same league as the HTC One M8 in the design stakes, and still feels as chunky and heavy in the hand, so it's only in terms of connectivity that the design is a win.

The bottom chin is designed to be more iconic

The rear-mounted buttons are something that most will need to get used to – but if you've used a G2 for any amount of time then you'll feel this is a much better design. A rounded power button and more smooth volume keys are welcome and do enhance the premium feel, but overall it's still got a slightly lightweight feel compared to the cool sensation metal offers.
I get the feeling that the design of the LG g3 is going to attract more users to the brand than ever before, but in terms of out and out 'premium' feel there's still more that could be done.
LG tells me that the metallic skin is designed to be the ultimate fusion between plastic and metal, combining form and functionality, but in reality it's a little too skewed towards the latter. Picking it up without knowing the backstory, someone would likely think it's a well-made, but plastic nonetheless, phone.
Don't get me wrong, it's not a bad thing. It's along the lines of Nokia's efforts, if a little more flimsy feeling, and is scratch resistant and comes with a removable back as a result. However, if you're after something that has the aesthetic power of a luxury car, something the One M8 does very well, this isn't the phone for you.

It looks slightly better than it feels

The screen is definitely impressive – the QHD display is a step forward in terms of sharpness, but not to the point I was expecting. Roll out the preloaded videos included with the G3 and you can't fail to be impressed with the sharpness, clarity and brightness on offer.
But these are optimised for the display, and I got the exact same sensation with the LG G2 in terms of impressive performance. Side by side, watching the pre-loaded videos, I was hard pushed to tell which was the better display, which is slightly worrying given there are four times as many pixels packed in.

The screen stands out with high quality video

There's no doubt the display on the G3 is a move forward, but I'm going to need to use it day to day to see if there's a real difference. Early tests show a really bright and clear screen, but not to the extent I was hoping.
Colors are more vivid, and the clarity of things like water reproduction is really impressive - however, LG has always had good form in this area and I was struggling to see how the QHD display offers anything more than the Full HD IPS LCD from before.
Some might say I'm damning phone manufacturers if they do and if they don't when it comes to including a QHD screen - but I was hoping to be blown away a little more from the off by this screen, so I'm going to need to spend some time using it day to day to get a really good feel for whether it's a real selling point.

LG claims that its battery will stand up next to the likes of Samsung, HTC and Sony in terms of power management, but given the QHD isn't mind-blowing I'm not sure that all the tricks used to improve the life of the 3000mAh battery (which, in fairness, is removable) were needed.
These tricks include a lot of intelligence under the hood - firstly, we're looking at a Snapdragon 801 processor clocked at 2.5GHz, and that allows LG to adapt things like the frame rate, clock speed and performance of the LCD at opportune times to save power.
 

The user interface update is probably the best part of the LG G3, which has moved from a convoluted mess to a sleek, flat icon design.
The notification area has been massively stripped back with a thinner typography used (which is prevalent throughout the phone) and the icons used throughout are much nicer to look at – both as a result of the re-design and the sharper screen.
LG has added in a few Google Now-esque tweaks to the process in order to give you the info you need apparently when you want it. This means that the weather won't just be a 'Partly Cloudy' with a temperature, it will let you know when it's windy and whether an umbrella will be needed later.

Similarly, if someone calls and you send a message promising to call them back and you DON'T, the phone will recognise that and gently poke you later to do so.
And it's also an adaptive system - at the start, it will flick you helpful how to videos, then later on the LG G3 will alert you about apps that can do cool stuff which you've not used. After a year, the phone will tell you about new stuff coming out, meaning you're never too far away from the chance to buy a new LG.

The notifications area is a lot cleaner

The slightly confusing thing here is that part of this information is stored to the left of the home screen (along with LG Health, which allows you to keep track of your steps as most other handsets allow you to do nowadays) and others are part of the dropdown on one of the homescreens.
It's not the biggest problem having them split, but you don't always have new notifications to to check out with this Smart Notice system, so it could easily get quite quickly ignored.
But the new UI is an excellent addition, and scratches an itch that I had with the G2 - along with the effort put into design, two of the biggest problems have been sorted in a big way here.

Camera

The camera on the LG G3 is one of the headline features of the new phone, with the same 13MP snapper as seen on the LG G2 - albeit with some upgrades.
The main difference is to the autofocus, where the G3 is able to take things from blurry to sharp in 0.276 seconds, compared with over 0.3 for the competition.

The camera interface is really stripped down

If that's not a reason to buy a phone, I don't know what is.
The system uses a laser detection system, one that actually came from a chance meeting on a coffee break with the LG Home Appliance system. That team had developed a laser which could see how far objects were ahead, thus stopping a mobile vacuum cleaner from lobbing itself down the stairs.
A few tweaks later, and the system is in the G3. The result is a (sadly invisible, although probably safer) cone of light spreading out when you press the shutter and getting a crisp image each time.
LG is touting 'simplicity' as the big selling point of this phone, and as such has made it so there's only one button on the camera - and that's not even the shutter. Like the Moto G, you press anywhere on the screen to take the snap... but this also focuses the image on the same point.
Generally this is a fine thing to do, but sometimes you'll want to do it a little differently. You then have to activate the older UI that includes things like the ability to activate the improved selfie camera and the 'Magic focus' mode (which is really the same old background defocus feature that's all the rage at the moment).
But while there are plenty of little things to play with on the camera, the main question revolves around the quality; thing is, it's oddly poor.
This needs a massive caveat: this is a pre-production sample from South Korea, so it's unfair to read anything into the performance. As such, the fact the snaps come out even muddier than those from the LG G2 (which itself had a real problem with over-processing) doesn't need to raise alarm bells... yet.
The pictures can be clear and sharp, but zoom in even a tiny amount and you'll see that things start to get very blurry indeed - as you can see with the waterfall picture below.
The camera isn't exactly as fast as I thought it would be either, but once again I'm going to out that down to early software, so await our full review before panicking.

Brighter scenes look washed out

The auto macro mode is impressive

Lower light didn't overly impress

But again, in close up the G3 excels

Detail is well captured

Here, the contrast is better captured than in lighter scenes

But zooming in on the waterfall shows a worrying amount of noise

The selfie mode is good - and the motion gesture to capture is cool

Early verdict

The LG G3 is a phone that's a real step forward and sends LG charging to the front of the pack when it comes to smartphone features – mostly because it has the most advanced screen out there with the new QHD option.
The internal specs are largely similar to the rest of the competition – nowadays this is less of an issue, as we're running with phones so powerful that the performance is impressive no matter what, so not being the first with the Snapdragon 805 CPU isn't as big a deal as it could be.
The LG G3 has a better design, uprated internals and all the things people look for in a smartphone: microSD support, a removable battery and upgraded design.
A faster camera, less of a focus on health and a better UI is exactly what we need from most phones today, and LG has offered that well in the G3.
However, it still doesn't wow as a phone in the same was as the HTC One M8 or even the Sony Xperia Z2 in terms of first impressions - this could be due to being a very early sample indeed, but both the design and the performance leave a little something to be desired.
That said, the raw power is there and the 'simplicity' promised looks like it will offer a phone that really does make it better to use – so here's hoping a longer amount of time spent with the phone yields a more impressive result.
LG has given us this pre-production unit to review - but as per TechRadar's review guarantee I won't be giving it a score and verdict until our final sample lands. However, check back in a few days to see our massively updated hands on with many of our in-depth tests run.