LG G4 Review – A Camera That Rivals My DSLR

LG G4 -A Camera That Rivals My DSLR

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I was looking for an awesome and the LG G4 fit all the tick boxes. I picked this phone up for only $96NZD (about $65USD as 8/11/2018) But find out why I can’t recommend this phone right now in my review below.

Specifications:

https://www.gsmarena.com/lg_g4-6901.php

CPU: Qualcomm MSM8992 Snapdragon 808 (20 nm) (This chip just gets wayyyyy tooooooo hot!!)

Camera: 16 MP, f/1.8, 28mm (wide), 1/2.6″, 1.12µm, 3-axis OIS, laser AF

Other Features:

-3.5mm headphone jack.

-Micro-USB with fast charging.

-Sim slot.

-Expandable Micro-SD expansion.

-Removable battery.

Performance: Super-fast and snappy. Never had any problems with games, watching videos or the odd live streaming. However, the phone heats up a lot and my highest temperature with the phone I had to put it down was at 55*c. I believe I was using android 6 > and I had a really enjoyable experience with it. Although I had Evie a custom launcher on top it was really good to see the way this phone is able to handle multitasking. There isn’t much else to say about this phone’s performance. It does its job well and very well, but it overheats…
Screen: The screen is amazing and very responsive. It has a QHD 1440 x 2560. It has a Gorilla Glass 3 screen, but I’ve found that it is prone to scratching, however, this could be due to the phone being second hand. This screen can be seen well in sunlight, with which has good contrast levels.  The screen is nice and bright and gives it a nice pop to what you are looking at on the phone screen. Overall a solid screen.

Reliability: For the most part, this phone is very reliable but it’s like a ticking time bomb, I’ll get to that in a bit.

Click here to advance straight to reliability

Camera: Amazing…Straight like a pocket DSLR. This camera captures with amazing quality and detail. This camera seriously rivals my DSLR in terms of still images. I love how many options you get to play around with the settings as I don’t like the default (because in most cases default settings on a camera aren’t that good.) It falls short in low light and images tend to become blurry. One problem is that the G4 only shoots 1080p, 720p @30fps.Rear facing is good and selfie camera is alright. However, If I could I would just turn the phone around to take a selfie. Honestly, this phone’s camera is even better than the Samsung Galaxy S7 in most situations. Simply put this camera is straight up amazing.
Speakers: Speakers are good and loud. However, the quality of them falls short. For me, these speakers are acceptable but have a lot of room for improvement. Considering that the speaker is on the rear of the phone it at time difficult to listen to the full clarity of a song or live stream.

Build and Design: It has a solid feels in the hand, however, the metal rails chip easily and the screen scratches pretty easily as well. The plastic back is prone to scratches, however, can be changed if need be. The phone has NFC and could have wireless charging if you get a new back for it. The design is okay, and if you like a phone that is curved you will probably enjoy this phone. Coming from a low Samsung device I usually have all of my IO on the side on the phone. However, the volume up and down with the power button are on the back of the phone. I actually found this quite annoying as I had to keep reaching there to raise or lower the volume. Some of you may enjoy this but I didn’t. For the power off I managed to fix this by tap to wake and tap to sleep by pressing the top of the menu bar where the time is on the phone. This was a good workaround and made the phone a lot easier to use.

Battery Life: Battery drains fast if you use the phone a lot. However, you can just replace the battery with a zero lemon 10000mAh battery so you would never have this problem. My LG G4 is ‘second hand’ which could also be why the battery was sub-par at times. But I am a light phone user and although the battery was at 2000mAh when I had it, this easily saw me through the whole day without needing a power bank.

Microphone/Call Quality: The speaker on this phone is pretty good for calls, it sounds alright and is defiantly audible. The microphone on this LG G4 is really good with family members saying that they can hear my far more clearly compared to my old phone. This microphone kind of impressed me in some ways as I was expecting it to be less than it actually was.

Boot Looping: Now my LG G4 supposedly my G4 didn’t have this Boot Loop issue. As it had a blue sticker and a model number that apparently was not affected by the boot loop. In short, the boot loop is caused by the overheating of the phone causing a chip on the motherboard to slightly lose contact. As a result, when you reboot the phone it will continue to boot loop and will no longer function. This is inevitable and the phone is like a ticking time bomb. This is why I eventually sold my LG G4 off, no matter how much I liked it. The phone was just getting too hot which was annoying and the boot loop really scared me from keeping this phone. You can search up this LG G4 Boot Loop issue and a lot of G4/other LG phones are caught up in this mess. There is a lawsuit I believe on this phone, but at the moment, as far as I know, there is no payout for the LG G4.

Overall:

Overall I just can recommend this phone as much as I love it.

I love this camera on this phone, but for all that its worth… DO NOT BUY THIS PHONE.

It’s just not worth risk of it breaking on you and it will just be a waste of money/another headache.

Scores:

Performance: 7/10

Build and Design: 7/10

Reliability: 2/10

Camera: 9/10

Battery: 5/10

Total: 30/50 = 0.6 X 100 = 60.0% / 100%

-YS

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