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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JoshHo - Friday, July 4, 2014 - link
Any phone with a non removable battery will have a reset mechanism. It's usually holding down the power button for 5-10 seconds.SleepyFE - Friday, July 4, 2014 - link
I was holding it down for a minute. Nothing happened. And now in the newer Android holding down the power button opens pop up. The pop up is useful, but it does not turn the phone off.devione - Friday, July 4, 2014 - link
My Sony Xperia Z1 Compact (and probably most in the Xperia line) hard resets when you hold volume down and power at the same time for a few seconds. It has yet to fail me and resets every time I've used it.Without mentioning your mobile phone model, which probably has a similar hard reset mechanism, you're probably just being disingenuous.
Do you complain about not being able to hard reset sealed laptops or tablets too?
SleepyFE - Friday, July 4, 2014 - link
I don't use or plan to use tablets. My laptop has a removable battery. The hard reset that you mention is a factory reset. At least it was on the LG L5. My old phone was the LG Swift.ZeDestructor - Friday, July 4, 2014 - link
Sony uses different combos than LG.flutberf - Friday, July 4, 2014 - link
Does your Z1c freeze often? I've never had my Z1s freeze. In fact, I haven't had a random reboot or freeze since my Galaxy Nexus.ZeDestructor - Saturday, July 5, 2014 - link
I've had it happen on my Z once, never on the Z1 or Z2.Then again, I seem to have amazing luck and miss almost all bugs...
cmdrdredd - Saturday, July 5, 2014 - link
I have had my Galaxy S3 freeze or restart on me at times. Mostly because I was not running stock software I think.fimurca - Friday, July 4, 2014 - link
Hold power button and volume down at the same time for several seconds. Internal battery is a non issue. I've had it lock up before. Power and down volume always works.ZeDestructor - Friday, July 4, 2014 - link
My Z1 (to be sold) and Z2 have a hard power-off switch near the SIM tray (or you can pull the SIM card out, that reboots the phone too). My Z before both (now my dad's) had a hard-poweroff if you held down the power button for some time (not sure if 4s or 10s), like most current PCs. Phone freezes are a non-excuse for people who want removable batteries.