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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SlyFoxHD - Friday, July 4, 2014 - link
LG G3 battery can withstand 6 hours of screen-on time,on full brightness.And watch
Suck it up.
http://www.phonearena.com/news/First-improvised-LG...
Flunk - Friday, July 4, 2014 - link
What you're saying isn't really compatible with what's said in this article, if it dims the screen even when you set the brightness manually how can you possibly test at 100% brightness?Troll fail.
mahalie - Friday, July 4, 2014 - link
It only dims the screen slightly if the phone is in danger of overheating, so it's possible to test the screen at 100% brightness.Alexey291 - Sunday, July 6, 2014 - link
So its 100% but its not full brightness - way to twist words /sighfokka - Friday, July 4, 2014 - link
full brightness*david4041 - Friday, July 4, 2014 - link
No.. If LG G3 had the same resolution as the GS5 or M8, with the bigger screen it would not have been as sharp (ppi). What LG managed to do was build a phone with a significantly bigger screen AND a higher ppi. And since the G3 has a thinner bevel, it isn't much bigger than the GS5 and M8.Battery life? From what I've read, the phone should last all day. That's all one really needs. Charge the phone at night, charge it while you're at your desk, charge it in the car, buy an extra battery, buy a battery pack.
peterfares - Friday, July 4, 2014 - link
It would have been plenty sharp with an RGB 5.5" screen. Look at the Note 3, that has a PenTile 1080p 5.7" screen.soldier45 - Sunday, July 6, 2014 - link
Haters going to hate innovation and moving forward with tech.flatrock - Tuesday, July 8, 2014 - link
The G3 is a showcase for what LG is capable of, so spec-sheet oneupmanship is to be expected. I would like to see 1080p screens show up on some slightly smaller and more affordable devices. Or LG can just keep making the G2 for a while. The G2 is a great phone and is still a high end phone even this long after the initial release. If the G3 didn't pull some spec-sheet oneupmanship the reviews would just be complaining about a lack of compelling differences from the G2. I guess it's the price LG pays for doing the G2 so well.barleyguy - Tuesday, July 8, 2014 - link
One place I can think of where the resolution would be a benefit, is Google Cardboard, or future VR implementations that use the same idea. With VR, the resolution of a small screen makes a significant difference, from what I've read.I'm pondering a G3 for that reason, as well as the removable battery and SD slot.