LG G Flex 2 review – the bendy phone that self heals

LG G FLEX 2 BATTERY LIFE

We were hoping its huge 3,000mAh battery and energy-efficient OLED screen might produce a winning combo, but battery life was something of a disappointment as well. It still managed a respectable 11h 25m in our continuous video playback test, but the Samsung Galaxy Note Edge’s 3,000mAh battery, for example, managed another 2 hours under the same conditions.

The top-heavy brightness settings are partly to blame for this, as our standard brightness 170cd/m2 actually came out as 69% on the phone’s overall brightness. Fortunately, the G Flex 2 supports fast-charging, reaching 50% from empty in just 40 minutes, so at least you won’t have to wait long if you happen to run out of juice mid-afternoon.

LG G FLEX 2 BENCHMARKS

Performance was slightly problematic at first, with the 2GHz octa-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 810 processor running extremely hot during our initial benchmarks. We thought it could be due to the 810’s much-rumoured heat-dissipation problems, but it was an issue we’ve had with other LG handsets in the past.

^ The G Flex 2 has its main buttons on the rear of the phone. This can take a little getting used to, but they’re within easy reach of your fingers

Thankfully, our more recent tests all ran relatively smoothly with almost no significant increase in the phone’s internal temperature, leading to a much more stable set of results. We also haven’t seen any limitations on the screen’s overall brightness levels, as the G3 often prevented us from raising the screen brightness over 80 or 90% if the phone became too hot. This could potentially still change, as LG could only provide us with Korean units rather than full UK samples for our review, but we’ll be keeping an eye on this when LG send us a UK model in the coming weeks.

In our latest scores, the G Flex 2 managed an overall score of 3,962 in PC Mark, putting it just behind other flagship phones we’ve tested such as Samsung’s Galaxy Note Edge and Galaxy Note 4. Its individual web browsing score of 4,768 was particularly high, putting it almost 1,000 points in front of both Samsung handsets.

As a result, it coped with complex web pages extremely well and we were able to pan round and zoom in on news articles with ease. We did notice a couple of slightly stuttering animations on the Android 5.0 home screens, though, particularly when swiping out of its annoyingly immovable LG Health and Smart Tips panel to the left of the main home screen.

^ The G Flex 2’s screen doesn’t catch many reflections, so it’s ideal for watching films and TV shows on the move

Graphics performance was also good, as it maxed out our 3DMark Ice Storm Extreme test and scored a massive 23,959 (or an average of 113.4fps) in Ice Storm Unlimited. This means it should have no trouble at all playing the latest 3D games, but we were surprised and slightly disappointed to see that it only managed 50.7fps in our Epic Citadel test on Ultra High quality settings. This is still a great score, but we were hoping for a near-perfect 60fps considering the capabilities of Qualcomm’s brand new Adreno 430 GPU.