The
Samsung Galaxy Note series has been a veritable success and over time it
has spawned similarly big phones from other Android OEMs as well. LG’s
first shot at this market was with the awkwardly shaped Optimus Vu that
was just too oddly designed to be usable even among a category of
generally
uncomfortably large phones.
LG’s next attempt comes in the form of the Optimus G Pro,
which right off the bat comes across as a much better device. First of
all, it doesn’t have an awkward square shape and secondly it boasts top
of the line hardware that will make most people sit up and take notice.
So things look good on paper but how does the phone stack up in real life? Let’s find out.
Design
LG has a history of making some fine looking phones. Regardless of
what the rest of the phone would be like, the hardware has usually been
attractive on LG phones. In recent times, LG lost some of its design
flair and instead decided to make generic looking phones. The Optimus G
Pro is exactly that sort of phone.
Well, first of all, the Optimus G Pro is a big phone, particularly
the height, which is long enough for the phone to peek out of your jeans
pocket. Although credit must be given to LG to make this phone a bit
narrower than the Galaxy Note II despite having similarly sized
displays. This is instantly noticeable while using the phone as despite
its size its not quite as ungainly to use as some of the other 5+ inch
phones.
Build quality also seems quite good. LG, like Samsung, has gone for
an all plastic body but it feels durable and although it isn’t anywhere
near as awesome as the aluminum body of the HTC One or even the glass
body of the Xperia Z it doesn’t look as bad as the Galaxy S4.
The problem is with the design, which is utterly boring. You’d expect
the flagship smartphone of the company to have some design flair but
you’ll find none of it here. The Optimus G Pro, especially in the black
unit we reviewed, looks like a generic black slabs and will easily get
lost among its ilk.
The front of the phone sports the 5.5-inch display with a fairly
minimal bezel on the top and bottom. Above the display is the earpiece,
the camera and the sensors, along with the LG logo. Below is the
physical home button flanked by the back key on the left and the menu
key on the right.
The menu button has a special trick up its sleeve. The silver ring
around it is actually the notification LED. And it’s not just any LED
but full RGB LED, which means it can display any color you want. You can
use an app like Light Flow to assign different colors to different app
notifications, which can be very useful.
Along the side is the power button on the right and the volume
buttons on the left. The buttons are placed perfectly, where they fall
exactly under your thumb and index fingers if you hold it in your right
hand. There is also an extra button near the top on the left side. You
can assign any app to it you want or disable it completely.
On the top is the headphone jack, the IR blaster and the secondary
microphone. On the bottom is the microUSB port and the primary
microphone.
On the back, you can see the camera lens near the top along with the
loudspeaker and the LED flash on either side. The design reminds me
strongly of the Galaxy S III, which too had a similar arrangement,
including a bump for the camera. The lens has this plastic surround with
a brushed metal finish that looks terrible and gets scratched easily.
The entire back side is a battery cover that comes off from the side.
On the cover is a checkered pattern, which is similar to that of the
Nexus 4 but since this is plastic and on the Nexus 4 it was underneath a
glass it doesn’t look anywhere as good. The plastic back also attracts a
lot of smudges and just looks awful most of the time.
Remove the cover and you’d find the large removable battery
underneath covering the micro SIM slot. The microSD card slot is on the
side and can be removed without switching the phone off. If you look
underneath the battery cover you’d find the hardware for the NFC as well
as the wireless charging. The Optimus G Pro supports the Qi charging
standard and will work with any any Qi-compatible charger that you might
have.
The wireless charging feature is a useful addition. In comparison,
neither the HTC One nor the Sony Xperia Z have this feature and the
Galaxy S4 requires a special cover to work with wireless chargers.
Unfortunately, I did not have a wireless charger at hand to test this
functionality.
Display
The Optimus G Pro has an utterly gorgeous display. It is a 5.5-inch
panel, which means it’s the same size as last year’s Galaxy Note II, but
it has a resolution of 1920x1080 and uses IPS technology, which just
makes it infinitely superior in comparison.
I have complained in the past about the pointlessness of 1080p panels
on smartphones because at 5.0-inches and lower, it’s really hard to
make out any difference in image quality compared to a similarly sized
720p panel. But at 5.5-inches, the extra pixels really do make their
presence felt. 720p at this size would have been stretched a bit thin
but 1080p looks perfectly fine, as you can tell from the 400PPI pixel
density.
It’s the combination of the size, the resolution and the quality of
the panel that makes the display on the Optimus G Pro such a joy to
behold. The colors, contrast, viewing angles, outdoors visibility, etc.
are all top notch. You just have to watch one of the videos that LG has
pre-installed on the phone to realize just how good this screen is.
If I have to nitpick, and I will, I will point out the minor issue
with the way the display is refreshed. The display on the Optimus G Pro
gets refreshed from bottom to top and there is a noticeable time
difference between the two points. Due to this, every time you scroll
horizontally, you’d notice that the content on the bottom of the screen
is moving slightly ahead of the content near the top of the screen. This
is most easily observable in the application drawer as you move left
and right.
The issue is not very severe and most people wouldn’t notice it as is
apparent from that fact that no one seems to have reported it so far
(or maybe it’s just on my review unit). It’s a minor issue in what is
otherwise an absolutely fantastic display.
Hardware, Software and Performance
The LG Optimus G Pro runs on the Qualcomm Snapdragon 600 SoC,
particularly the APQ8064T, with a quad-core 1.7GHz Krait 300 CPU and
Adreno 320 GPU. This is one of the fastest processors available today
and it shows in the performance, which we will discuss later. In terms
of memory, the Optimus G Pro has 2GB of RAM and 16GB of internal storage
space with microSD card slot for expansion. In terms of connectivity,
it supports HSPA+, Wi-Fi 802.11a/b/g/n/ac, Bluetooth 4.0, A-GPS, NFC and
Infrared.
In terms of software, the Optimus G Pro runs on Android 4.1.2 Jelly
Bean with LG’s custom UI on top. As far as custom skins are concerned,
LG’s isn’t most popular around but if you leave aside the blind hatred
that is often leveled at Android skins and look at it objectively there
is a lot to like here.
In terms of features, LG’s skin is almost on par with Samsung’s skin
on the S4. There is a lot of useful stuff here, such as the notification
drawer shortcuts and some of the less useful stuff as well, such as
Smart screen which detects if you are looking at the screen to prevent
switching off the display backlight and smart video that pauses the
video when you look away. As you can tell, there is a lot of unabashed
borrowing of features here from Samsung, including things like the
one-handed keyboard and layout of the notification screen. LG even lets
you arrange the Settings app in a tabbed layout, something Samsung
introduced with the S4.
However, leaving aside some of the frivolous stuff there are some
genuinely useful things here. There is an LG remote control app that
works with the built-in IR blaster and lets you remotely control your
TV, set top box, audio system, Blu-ray and DVD player, projector and
even an air conditioner. The default LG keyboard is pretty decent but
the best part about it is that it lets you enter emoji into your
messages. LG has included system-wide support for typing and viewing
emoji and this is not the terrible black, Android themed emoji that
Google introduced with Jelly Bean but full color emoji that closely
resembles the one you find on Apple’s devices. I personally find this a
very useful addition especially considering how heavily emoji is used
these days.
Bloatware is minimum in LG’s skin and the phone just comes with a
bunch of LG apps pre-installed. But the best part is that all of these
can be uninstalled. There is a separate app called Application Manager
that only exists to let you uninstall the apps added by LG. This is far
cry from what you see on Sony and HTC phones that come loaded with all
sorts of garbage apps.
My only real problem with the software is that it looks unpleasant at
best and horrible at worst. LG clearly doesn’t spend enough time on the
aesthetics of the whole thing or doesn’t have good enough designers.
You tend to get used to it after a while but it never looks as good as
stock Android or even the HTC Sense 5.
In terms of performance the UI is largely fluid. The Snapdragon 600
SoC is quite powerful and makes quick work of UI transitions, scrolling
and app launches. Meanwhile, the 2GB RAM ensures that performance
remains good even when you have several apps running in the background.
It pains me to say that even after all these years Android still doesn’t
feel as fluid as iOS or Windows Phone but it seems to be getting there
and at least on the Optimus G Pro it’s not all that far behind. It’s not
the smoothest phone I’ve used but it’s quite good overall and
definitely the most fluid Android devices on the market right now.
Multimedia
The Optimus G Pro has a 13 megapixel camera on the back with an LED
flash. The camera takes some really good pictures in daylight. The 13
megapixel sensor manages to capture a fair amount of detail with natural
colors but there is also noticeable sharpening in the images that looks
unpleasant when you zoom in all the way.
The camera has an HDR mode that you can use while dealing with high
contrast scenes. The HDR mode is effective but subtle so it can be used
for everyday shots without the photos looking unnecessarily over
processed. More importantly, the HDR mode gets rid of the over
sharpening and bit of the noise out of the images as well and gives them
a cleaner look overall.
In low light things go downhill considerably. The noise reduction
algorithm is so severe that photos are soft to the point where they look
unfocused. Even after repeated attempts indoor shots came out soft with
poor details.
For viewing images and videos, the Optimus G Pro is absolutely
fantastic. A lot of this is due to the beautiful display that makes
everything looks great. Watching 1080p videos in particular is an
enjoyable experience and you can watch entire movies without an issue.
The Dolby sound setting works really well if your videos have six
channel sound in AC3 audio codec and the bundled LG headset also sounds
pretty decent.
Battery Life
The Optimus G Pro has a mammoth 3,140mAh battery. With regular usage
consisting of calls, messages, social networking, web browsing and
playing music, the Optimus G Pro lasted for a day and a half on a single
charge (3G), which is quite an achievement. While playing back a 1080p
video at 70 percent brightness and headphones, the phone lasted for
approximately six hours on a single charge (Wi-Fi).
Verdict
There is a lot to like with the Optimus G Pro. The screen is
fabulous, the phone is fast, the camera is quite decent as long as
you’re shooting in daylight and the battery life is really good. It also
comes loaded with a ton of software and hardware features, some of
which are useful and others you don’t really need.
As with everything, there are negatives here as well. The design, for
once, is just plain drab and boring. I understand that is a subjective
thing but most people agreed with me on this. The low light performance
of the camera was also not impressive and LG’s software, although useful
at times, is just unattractive.
Are these things really deal breakers? Maybe for some, but overall I
think the Optimus G Pro is a really solid smartphone. It’s quite large
so obviously so it’s not meant for everyone but if you are comfortable
with large smartphones and don’t like what Samsung, HTC or Sony are
doing then you should definitely take a look at this. More than
anything, that display might just win you over.
