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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Mumrik - Sunday, July 6, 2014 - link
"even if it’s a bit off-putting that LG is trying to make plastic feel like metal. "I'm generally not a fan of that either, but surely it's better than Samsung working hard to make plastic feel even cheaper?
rlab_joo - Sunday, July 6, 2014 - link
I wouldn't worry about battery life too much. The devs, and rom creators, at xda developers, haven't got to it yet, you can do wonders there.CoryS - Monday, July 7, 2014 - link
No...people convince themselves they do wonders. In reality custom roms usually hurt battery life, and custom kernels have hosts of other issues.Sunsmasher - Monday, July 7, 2014 - link
This is by far the most thorough, insightful and intelligent review that I've seen on the LG G3.I own the G2, and this review gave me more valuable information than any other review that I've read (and I've read many, many of them). Kudos to Joshua and Anand!
rocktober13 - Monday, July 7, 2014 - link
Is it worth the extra $100 or $200 over the G2? I have an upgrade coming up on Verizon. I don't like the M8 with the wasted space from the HTC logo, and my wife has the GS5 so I can't get that ;).Also, I heard there is a 2GB and 3GB version; would there be any noticeable difference in performance?
yvn - Monday, July 7, 2014 - link
I was so gonna get this phone as I hoped the display would be the best in regards to color accuracy....i am very disappointed now :(djc208 - Tuesday, July 8, 2014 - link
My biggest problem with my original Optimus G has been LGs speed in updating the software. There are reports that we might get one last bump to 4.4 kitkat, otherwise they they haven't released an upgrade since they went to 4.2, which is sad considering it's essentially the same phone as the Nexus 5, so Google practically does all the work for them.Meanwhile the SGS4 is already running 4.4.
phoenix_rizzen - Friday, July 11, 2014 - link
Optimus G is the same phone as the Nexus 4, not the Nexus 5 which is based on the LG G2.The OG is very easy to root and install custom ROMs onto. There's a vibrant community of devs working on the OG on XDA. My OG died before I could test Android 4.4 on it, but it ran beautifully with RootBox (Android 4.2.2) and Carbon (Android 4.3.1). ParanoidAndroid, SlimBean/SlimKat, and a handful of others are also available.
I tried to like the LG version of Android, but just could not get over the colour scheme (too bright for me; physically painful to use in the dark, even at low brightness). The only part of the LG ROM I liked was the handwriting recognition in the keyboard. However, the gesture feature of the AOSP keyboard is much nicer to use. :)
PETER WONG - Tuesday, July 8, 2014 - link
Finally this morning Google help me to install Candy Crush in G3Shan83 - Wednesday, July 9, 2014 - link
Guys, people who are using this phone for quite some time, please do share your thoughts about "overheating" of G3 being mentioned by people.Is it abnormally getting heated even upon moderate usage / playing low graphic intense game or continuous Wi-Fi usage?
Please comment.