LG G2 review

At first glance, the G2’s 5in, 1,920×1,080 screen appears pretty much flawless. It’s an IPS model, but we could see levels of contrast and colour vibrancy on a par with AMOLED displays. It took a significant amount of staring at the G2, the Samsung Galaxy S4 and the Sony Xperia Z1 side by side in order to see the strengths and weaknesses of the different screens.

The Xperia Z1, whose screen impressed us when we first saw it, was at the bottom of the pack. We were impressed with its snowy whites, but colours looked insipid next to the competition, especially when we turned up the Z1’s brightness to match that of the other phones. The Galaxy S4’s AMOLED display has a huge amount of contrast, which really helps show up detail in darker areas of photos, but the display’s colour balance tends towards the warm; there’s a slight yellow tinge in white areas.

At first, we though the LG G2’s screen had the Galaxy S4 beaten, as colours remain incredibly saturated even at high brightness levels, and whites are just as pure as on the Xperia Z1’s display, with no colour tinge of any kind. However, the G2 can’t quite match the S4 for contrast and shadow detail. It’s a close-run thing, and which display is better for you depends on whether you value colour accuracy over absolute contrast.

The G2 is the first phone we’ve seen that supports 24bit, 192kHz uncompressed audio. Android doesn’t natively support anything beyond 16bit/44kHz so LG has made software modifications and used Qualcomm’s WCD9320 DAC to provide the best possible sound quality. Admittedly it makes little difference if you keep your music as highly compressed 128kbps MP3s, but anyone with a library of higher quality tracks will finally be able to take them on the move without downsampling or compatibility issues. The default music player even disables any EQ presets you may have enabled when it detects an uncompressed track, preventing audio from distorting.

You’ll only be able to tell the difference with a quality pair of headphones though, as although the G2’s internal speaker is surprisingly loud and sounds reasonably clear for a smartphone, it isn’t sensitive enough to pick out the details in an uncompressed FLAC track.

The G2 is quick – there’s no doubt about that. Its 2.2GHz quad-core Snapdragon 800 processor is the fastest chip out there, and this showed in our benchmarks. The phone completed the Sunspider JavaScript benchmark in 931ms, which is similar to the Galaxy S4’s score, and showed its gaming prowess with a huge 15,683 in 3DMark. You’ll have to keep an eye on the number of 3D games you download, though; the G2 has just 12GB of storage available for apps and your files, and no microSD card slot to add more.

The phone is slightly slower than the Sony Xperia Z1 in our benchmarks, despite having the same processor. This could be down to software optimisations or the G2’s design meaning the chip can’t boost up to its maximum clock speed as often. In general the phone feels extremely fast, but we did notice some hesitation when rendering and scrolling around graphics-heavy web pages; something that didn’t occur on the Xperia Z1.

Despite having such a big screen and a high-performance processor, the G2’s 3,000mAh battery gives it astonishing battery life. The G2 managed to play a film on loop for an amazing 16h 47m before running flat, comfortably beating the Samsung Galaxy Note 3 into second place as the longest-lived phone we’ve seen.