LG today unveiled its latest flagship handset — the LG G4. The company had already unveiled most of the key specs of the handset over the last few weeks, so the G4 announcement did not really pack any surprise.
While the G4 comes with the same 5.5-inch Quad HD display as found on its predecessor, it now features better saturation and accuracy whilst consuming lesser power than it thanks to its Graphic RAM. The new display is 25% brighter than its predecessor along with 50% improved contrast levels and 20% better color reproduction. However, the bezels surrounding the display have slightly increased in size, which makes the G4 a wee bit bigger than the G3.
LG has also taken a page out of the G Flex 2 and given the G4 a slight curve, which the company states makes the display less likely to crack due to a fall.
Internally, LG has shunned Qualcomm’s flagship chipset — the Snapdragon 810 — in favor of the hexa-core Snapdragon 808. While the latter is not as powerful as S810, it is bound to have less overheating issues. The Snapdragon 808 chip comprises of four Cortex-A53 cores clocked at 1.5GHz, and two Cortex-A57 cores clocked at 1.9GHz. This is coupled with an Adreno 418 GPU, 3GB of LPDDR4 RAM, 32GB internal storage and a microSD card slot.
“We are living up to our promise of Innovation for a Better Life with a fashionable, premium smartphone that is more focused on delivering a balanced user experience that can compete with the best of the best,” said Juno Cho, president and CEO of the LG Electronics Mobile Communications Company. “We wanted to give consumers a truly human-centric device that combined the analog sensibilities with technologies that delivered real world performance. From the design to the camera to the display to the UX, this is the most ambitious phone we’ve ever created.”
On the connectivity side, the G4 comes with 4G LTE Cat. 6 with download speeds of up to 450Mbps (X10 LTE modem), Wi-Fi g/n/ac, Bluetooth 4.1, NFC, Wireless Charging, GPS and more. The G4 is also the first handset on the market to use sensor assisted positioning for better location accuracy indoors and around large buildings. The handset also comes with a removable 3000mAh battery, which is capable of being charged from 0-50% in only 40 minutes thanks to Quick Charge 2.0.
LG is using a 16MP shooter on the G4 that features an F/1.8 aperture and an IR filter for accurate white balance. The camera is aided by OIS 2.0 — that is now able to compensate for shakes by up to 2 degrees including Z axis — and a color spectrum sensor that is able to recognize both light and objects for accurate color reproduction and quick autofocus. To make sure that G4 owners are able to extract the very maximum performance from the 16MP shooter, LG has also included a powerful Manual mode in its camera app that will allow G4 users to play around with the focus, ISO, exposure, shutter speed and more. The camera app also allows to save images in RAW format.
Additionally, the handset is capable of recording 4K videos — a feature becoming a commonplace in high-end Android devices now. LG boasts that the camera app on the G4 launches in only 0.6 seconds from sleep.
The front camera now has an 8MP resolution and an F/2.0 aperture, which along with an intuitive new gesture makes it easier to take great selfies.
As LG had previously unveiled, the LG G4 comes with a genuine leather back that takes up to 12 weeks for the company to manufacture. The leather back of every G4 will be unique, and over time, the leather will pick up characters of its users. The handset will be available in contoured ceramic back and hammered metallic finish with diamond pattern on its back.
On the software side, the G4 runs on Android 5.1 Lollipop with LG’s UX 4.0 on top of it. The latest version of LG’s “human-centric” UX packs in new features like Quick Shot, Smart Board, Smart Bulletin and more. Google is teaming up with LG and will be offering 100GB of free storage space on Drive to all G4 owners. Additionally, G4 owners will now be able to use their Google account to create and sign-in to their LG account where they can create a backup of all their important data on the handset.
LG G4 will be making its way to all the major carriers in the United States by the end of May or early June.
