The LG G5 went on sale late last week in LG’s home market, South Korea, and the United States. The company’s latest flagship handset for the first half of 2016 packs in a bunch of novel new features that sets it apart from other flagship phones in the market.
No, I am not saying that you should go ahead and buy the LG G5 right away. What I am saying is that the handset packs some really unique features, which might just be compelling enough for some people to go ahead and purchase the phone. Wondering what they are? Read below.
#5 IR Blaster
The lack of an IR blaster on the Samsung Galaxy S7 and Galaxy S7 edge has been a bummer for many people. The exclusion of the sensor was not really a surprise since Samsung had dumped the IR blaster on the Galaxy Note 5 last year itself.
LG, however, has included an IR blaster on the LG G5, which when coupled with the company’s Quick Remote app makes it possible to control all electronic appliances around you.
While this might not seem like a big deal to many, an IR blaster is actually a very useful feature to have in a smartphone. Once you start controlling every other home appliance around you using your smartphone, using a remote to do so features ancient.
#4 Removable battery
Flagship smartphones with a removable battery are a dying breed. In fact, a removable battery has become a rarity in smartphones itself, irrespective of their price point. Bucking the trend is LG’s G5, which despite coming with a metal unibody design features a 2,800mAh removable battery.
Yes, the battery is slightly smaller than the Galaxy S7 and other flagship Android smartphones, but at the end of the day, you can easily swap in a new battery to go from 0-100% in just a few seconds — something which is not possible on any other smartphone in the market right now.
Even better, LG is including a free spare battery with the G5 in almost all markets of the world, so you won’t have to spend dough on buying one yourself.
#3 Friends
The modular design of the LG G5 is a huge selling point of the handset — at least that’s what LG thinks. The bottom part of the G5 slides out to insert ‘Friends’, which are modules developed specifically to work with the phone to enhance its functionality. LG is calling them ‘Friends’ and its whole marketing campaign revolves around them.
Depending on your needs, some of the G5’s Friends can be extremely useful, while others may just find it to be a gimmick. Some of the G5’s Friends include a Hi-Fi DAC from B&O Play, a Camera grip that also adds an additional 1,100mAh battery, and a VR headset. LG has not revealed the pricing of these Friends, but don’t expect them to be light on your pocket in anyway.
#2 Always-On Display
Just like the Galaxy S7 and S7 edge, the LG G5 also comes with an always-on display. While Samsung’s flagship handsets use an AMOLED display, LG has managed to bring the same feature to the G5 despite using an IPS LCD display on it. Keeping an IPS LCD display on all the time can severely affect battery life, so LG had to make quite a few technological innovations to workaround this problem. This includes giving the display a secondary IC memory and power supply to keep power consumption in check.
LG claims that the always-on display consumes anywhere between 0.3 to 0.8 percent of battery life per hour, which is incredibly low. The company says that this drain is lower than turning on the display frequently to check for notifications.
#1 Wide-angle camera
If you look at the rear of the LG G5, you will notice that it features two camera lens. One is the handset’s primary 16MP f/1.9 shooter, while the secondary sensor sports an 8MP resolution with an extremely wide-angle lens. Using some smart stitching technology, the G5 can use the data from the two camera sensors to output a final extremely wide-angle image, which a smartphone with a single camera lens can never match.
The wide-angle lens is almost as wide as a human eye and allows one to fit in substantially more in a single shot. Below is a quick video from LG to show just how wide photos you can capture using the rear camera of the handset.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ZKWmEAsFBU
Bonus: SD card
While some OEMs continue to have an on-off relationship with a microSD card slot on their handset, LG’s relationship with it has remained rocksteady. Like with almost every other LG handset, the G5 also comes with a microSD card slot that supports cards of up to 2TB.
The inclusion of an SD card in itself on the G5 is not a big deal though; it is how LG has implemented it. Despite running on Marshmallow, LG has not implemented the new adoptable storage feature on the G5, which would have made it possible to mount an external storage as an internal one. This way users would not have had to worry about transferring apps and their app data to external storage themselves.
Obviously, if you have never used a device running Marshmallow with the adoptable storage feature enabled, you are never going to know what you are missing out on.
What do you think about the LG G5? Were any of the above features listed above a key reason for you to buy the handset? Or did you end up buying the Samsung Galaxy S7 or S7 edge? Drop in a comment below and let us know!
