LG’s new champion smartphone, the G3, finally saw the light of day here in India today. Here we take a quick glimpse through the attractive LG G3 flagship which, among other things, sports a mesmerizing QHD display, exquisite button-less design with a premium finish, latest hardware and other bells and whistles. Let's take a look.
Display: The LG G3 has a gorgeous 5.5-inch QHD display with a 2560×1440 pixel resolution and a 538 ppi. Images and videos look beautiful on the LG G3’s screen, with eye-popping colours. The screen felt extremely responsive, and viewing angles were great, too. If anything, we felt the screen to be just a bit too bright – but we’re absolutely nitpicking here.
Build and design: The LG G3 sports a polished metallic skin on its back panel that’s lightweight, fingerprint-proof and elegant. It’s a device that exudes class and a sense of fine craftsmanship with nice attention to detail. The bezel is narrow and the phone adequately thin – it’s not too chunky, not uncomfortably thin either. You definitely need two hands to interact with the phone for most tasks. The LG G3 phone is available in five colour variants – gold, white, aluminium grey, violet, and burgundy red. We certainly preferred the gold look better than all the others.
Hardware: Of course, powering the top notch experience of the LG G3 is a quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 SoC, which boasts a Krait 400 CPU (with 2.5GHz per core) and an Adreno 330 GPU.
This pretty much guarantees that from a hardware perspective the LG G3 is right up there among other great smartphones of our time, and it sure does feel so when we used the LG G3 – whether it was watching UHD videos, multitasking with several apps, closing apps, opening new ones, taking photos or videos, etc. The phone didn’t really lag at any point, and that says quite a lot about its impressive hardware underneath.
Audio and video: Watching UHD videos was great fun on the LG G3 – dragging and seeking was instantaneous, no perceptible lag at all. The pinch to zoom feature while watching a video is a nifty addition to the multimedia experience on the LG G3. It works like a charm. Audio from the 1-watt speaker grille situated near the bottom of the phone’s back panel is nice, loud, and clear at high volume. The audio quality on the phone is certainly one of the better ones we’ve heard among current-gen smartphone flagships.
Screen lock: The LG G3 smartphone comes with LG’s Knock Code built-in which is a departure from entering PIN or Patterns to unlock your smartphone. Through Knock Code, you can set between a 2-tap to 8-tap customized unlock pattern, spread across different parts of your screen, to make guessing your phone’s unlock code that much more difficult. Read more about it here.
Keyboard: The LG G3 sports a smart keyboard which not only throws up predictive text but also boasts of an adaptive learning feature – basically, the phone’s keyboard learns as you type, what region of the screen do you hit most, most frequently typed words, etc. What’s more, the phone’s keyboard is also easily resizable, should you feel its original size to be “small”. This enlargement is done by simply pressing the top line of the keyboard and dragging it up. The typing experience on the keyboard felt very good.
Selfie mode: The LG G3 smartphone’s “smart design” feature is nicely showcased in the phone’s selfie mode, which makes taking mugshots of yourself and others around you a smooth, intuitive and quick process. All you have to is hold your hand in front of the phone’s camera, after it detects your palm you need to twist into a fist. This starts a three-second countdown on the camera, allowing you enough time to pose and take the best selfie you’ve ever taken. Check out how it’s done here.
Smart case: The LG G3 smartphone comes with a whole host of accessories, including bluetooth headsets, wireless charging docks, and this – a smart case. The smart case has a circular hole at the front, which triggers a quick-launch OS without flipping the cover. This “dial” lets you access call logs, SMSes, Music, Camera, and a LG Health app quickly without opening the phone. Looks nice but feels more of a fad than anything that’s really useful at this point.
Also see: LG G3 smartphone photo gallery