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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peterfares - Friday, July 4, 2014 - link
I agree. Give me a damn removable battery and SD slot.Stacking it might get it to have slightly more capacity but not that much. Like 5% more. I'd rather have it be removable.
Krysto - Friday, July 4, 2014 - link
Android OEMs short-sighted focus on marketing gimmicks to the detriment of actual performance is infuriating. As you said, LG could've chosen a higher quality 1080p display, that along with the same battery would've also given better battery life and higher performance. But no, instead they chose to chase the "bigger is always better" gimmick.We have a Full HD display in the palm of our hands - what more could we possibly need? They could've chose a 1080p display with a bigger focus on sunlight visibility, or just leave it the same, and focus on improving the camera even more, or making a more solid device.
ZeDestructor - Friday, July 4, 2014 - link
What kills it for me is the 5.5" Size. As someone who did the Xperia Z->Z1->Z2 route (the LCD did improve successively every generation, especially wrt colour gamut), phones are getting more and more unwieldy. If it weren't for the fact that the Z2 is physically narrower than the Z1, I'd have skipped it and waited for the Z2 or Z3 compact.SleepyFE - Friday, July 4, 2014 - link
I still prefer battery life. 480x800 is enough for me. It doesn't distort smaller letters, so i can still read a fully zoomed out web page (if it's not too wide). And you can have a smaller phone (a must since i keep it in my front pocket). I also prefer a bit more space between the screen and the edge. Right now i can't use my phone with one hand as it detects the tips of my fingers when i hold my phone. My grip has to be too lose for my liking.ZeDestructor - Friday, July 4, 2014 - link
480x800 and even 1280x720/1280x800 suck compared to 1080p. It's not just the ability to render, it's the font smoothing that's required. You need extensive smoothing at lower densities, and while it produces something readable (if fatiguing) for Latin-based, Cryllic and most Middle-Eastern and Indial peninsula characters, far-eastern scripts like Japanese or Mandarin render poorly, especially beneath 300ppi.Here's a comparison between 300ppi and 600ppi by JDI in 2012: http://www.j-display.com/english/news/2012/2012060...
SleepyFE - Friday, July 4, 2014 - link
Yeah with 3mm blown up to 2cm. But that's not how zoom work is it? Like you said, the font smoothing solves it and since there is less pixels the GPU consumes less power as well.ZeDestructor - Friday, July 4, 2014 - link
If you've never read Asian characters for any extended period of time, you'll think that font smoothing is enough. Fact is, it's not. With font smoothing, at small sizes, Far-Eastern characters just look like a blurry, gray mess, so people use hand-designed, pixel-perfect bitmap fonts instead.. For an equivalent comparison zoom it out to around 40-50% (because yay 100ppi on most computers :/). The difference in quality matters in person. Not for us, but for other people elsewhere on the planet.SleepyFE - Friday, July 4, 2014 - link
Another problem with the comparison is the size of Asian characters. In the picture they are the same size as latin characters. They write them bigger on paper for a reason. They would be a blob of ink if they were only a few millimeters. They need to use bigger fonts for their characters. Problem solved.ZeDestructor - Saturday, July 5, 2014 - link
On electronic media, Asian characters are sized similarly to Latin characters.fokka - Friday, July 4, 2014 - link
i also prefer battery life, but i think the z1 compact, moto g and moto x are at the sweet spot of resolution for me 720p is nothing over the top anymore and makes for perfectly fine ppi at 4.3-4.7 inches.1080p is great too at 5 inches and upwards, but that's already where diminishing returns kick in heavily.
but 1440p is just stupid with phones you can burn through in 3 hours, if you really want to.