The LG G3 Review
by Joshua Ho & Anand Lal Shimpi on July 4, 2014 5:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- LG
- Mobile
- Laptops
- G3
Platform Power
In the weeks leading up to this review there seemed to be a litany of headlines crowning the G3 as the new king of the battery life hill in the Android space. Our own battery life results disagreed with the conclusions but I wanted something a bit more concrete. Thankfully with a removable back cover and removable battery, instrumenting the G3 for power analysis is just as easy as it is on the Galaxy S5. Just like we did in our Galaxy S5 review, we measured device level power (with the display enabled) running a number of workloads. As always, all displays were calibrated to the same brightness level (200 nits, full white). Note that we are looking at average power here, not energy consumption. The latter is really what you want to report but for our needs here average power should be good enough.
At idle looking at a white screen the G3 uses more power than a Galaxy S5. Here we see the real burden of using LG's 2560 x 1440 panel, lighting up that many pixels definitely takes its toll on power consumption. Compared to the GS4 however, LG's G3 is an improvement. When asleep and in pocket the GS5 has a negligible advantage, the G3 is fairly close and is clearly better than the Snapdragon 600 based GS4.
The SunSpider results give you the other datapoint that should put to rest the G3's power consumption story. Under a heavy CPU load, the GS5 still manages lower overall platform power although the G3 again is better than the GS4. The SunSpider numbers combined with the idle/white screen numbers are enough to tell the story about G3's battery life vs. Galaxy S5. The G3 has a 5% larger battery but the potential gap in power consumption is much larger.
The video capture, camera preview and GFXBench results are interesting to look at but I wouldn't conclude much here other than to say that the G3 as a platform can consume quite a bit of power under load. For a better look at these scenarios we'd need to integrate power consumption over time to calculate energy usage, which as I mentioned before was beyond what we really needed to do for this review.
The main point here is to settle the debate about the G3's battery life. Yes, it has a larger battery than the Galaxy S5, but that doesn't mean it'll last longer on a single charge. I won't comment on reasons that other battery life tests would conclude differently.
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Rdmkr - Friday, July 4, 2014 - link
The concluding statements gave me a laugh; I agree that everything about this phone is perfect except what distinguishes it from the LG G2. If they just made an incremental update of that model they'd be exactly where they need to be. Which kinda raises the question of why they don't just do that. The way smartphone OEMs rigidly classify and offer their models without them ever changing has never been something I well understood.MonkeyPaw - Friday, July 4, 2014 - link
You need some Lumia phones in your camera tests. The 1020 and the 930 might be a nice start.BPB - Friday, July 4, 2014 - link
Agreed!MonkeyPaw - Friday, July 4, 2014 - link
Can't say I've ever seen a Lumia (or WP device) review on Anandtech, save the 521. As unique as the 1020 was, all we saw was a "hands on" at a press event. A little more coverage would be nice.webby7 - Friday, July 4, 2014 - link
So, are we still pretending your senior smartphone editor has dropped off the face of the planet?The lack of information on this is really poor form.
Anand Lal Shimpi - Friday, July 4, 2014 - link
If there was something I could share I would :)cylemmulo - Friday, July 4, 2014 - link
Any phone that resolution, even like a 7 inch tablet serves no purpose except to trick people into buying the phone and eat battery life. Leave me at 720p and give me my battery life back.cmdrdredd - Saturday, July 5, 2014 - link
720p isn't enough, it's gotta be 1080p because yes, I notice differences when watching 1080p videos.phoenix_rizzen - Friday, July 11, 2014 - link
LG Optimus G has a 4.7", 720p screen, and a 2100 mAh battery, weighing only 145g.LG G2 has a 5.2", 1080p screen, a 3000 mAh battery, weighing slightly less (143g), and is only just barely larger than the OG.
OG: 131.9 x 68.9 x 8.5 mm
G2: 138.5 x 70.9 x 8.9 mm
Yet, battery life on the G2 is phenomenal compared to the OG (or, really, any other phone out there). People routinely get 6+ hours of screen-on time, even with the default LG version of Android. And plenty of people can push that to 10+. Personally, I've only ever topped 7 hours, but it's an almost daily occurence now (Mahdi ROM, based on Android 4.4.4, with ART enabled).
There's more to a solid performing, long lasting phone than just the screen. :)
However, I (personally) don't see a reason to go above ~5 inches and 1080p on a phone. For a tablet (7"+), sure. The 2012 Nexus 7 has a horrible screen resolution for the size, although the SoC really limits the choices in resolution. :)
The LG G2 is just about perfect. If only it had a slide-out keyboard ... :(
dwade123 - Friday, July 4, 2014 - link
Android is so damn ugly. Hire some actual designers.