Nicole Scott is certainly the kind of girl who takes her to devices in a very personal and intimate way, and the LG G2 was one device from 2013 that had her absolutely stoked. In fact Nicole is convinced that the G2 is in fact still LG’s most impressive smartphone eclipsing the new and highly acclaimed G3. Catch Nicole Scott present a very strong case for why the LG G2 is better than the new LG G3.
The world’s major smartphone manufacturers strive to make each generation of phone better than the previous generation, making improvements in terms of the internal hardware components used, the touchscreen panels and the software implemented. This is of course linked directly global technological progress that includes the discovery of fire, the wheel, the steam engine etc. In the current digital age we have come to expect progress of from year to year, month on month – a frightening pace considering the history that precedes it. But is the pressure to continually improve, encouraging companies like LG to produce products that disappoint?
The LG G3 is a fantastic phone, no doubt about it, but is the extreme efforts of LG to create a worthy successor to the G2 really paying off? Or is simply backfiring?Today we present to you five reasons why we think the G3 is in fact a step backwards in technological evolution.
Before you read on, catch the video below where Nicole gets it all off her chest. The LG G3 was supposed to inspire love – we find in fact, that after three weeks, it has begotten a rant of epic proportions:
1. Battery Life Sucks
In our testing of the LG G2 we found the battery life to be capable of last 10:22 minutes, this is considerably more than the G3 which managed only 6:10. Getting a full day’s use from the G3 has proved to a be a challenge. A full working day when the phone is actually being used a little more intensely throughout the day? Forget it…
The QHD screen will of course affect power draw, but is the Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 configured to be as optimized as possible? Is the battery itself up to scratch? Either way, the LG G3 is way off the pace in regular power mode, in everyday use, especially compared to its predecessor.
2. Quad HD Display
The LG G3 ups the pixel density by quite some distance, sporting a QHD 2560 x 1440 resolution, 5.5 inch IPS panel that offers a pixel density of 534 PPI. QHD might well be the future of smartphone design, but right now it arguably arrives at a cost to the overall experience. In general, screens are top of the list when it comes to battery drain, but 1440p screens do it a lot faster.
The G3 also gets hot due to the extra pixels. Do we really need QHD on our 5 inch phones? Nicole argues that we do not and the 1080p display of the G2 was phenomenal. It makes a good case for showing off to your friends – if you have 1440p content – but aside from that there is little to enhance your life, and plenty to degrade it.
3. Limited Brightness Due to Overheating
The LG G3′s 1440p QHD screen can certainly contribute to the devices overall heat, so much so that the G3 has been configured to effectively disable full display brightness when it reaches a certain temperature. This happened to us one day when we were filming on the beach at Yilan. Being mid summer in Taiwan, it was of course a bright sunny day with temperatures of around 34-36 degrees C (up to 96 degrees F) and all our devices were getting hot as they were being used – yes, sunlight and high temperatures make phones hot the same as it makes us hot. The G3 was the only phone that became effectively unusable as the display could not reach the full brightness it required to be visible in this kind of weather.
Clearly the 1440p display had forced the LG engineers to limit brightness at certain temperatures, a fact that plain sucks because high temperatures (i.e. hot sunny days) are exactly the time when you really actually need full brightness. This is maybe not an issue for more temperate climes, but a real pain in the ass in South Asia where we happen to be…
4. Overall Device Size
The LG G3 encompasses a 5.5 inch display that effectively makes for a longer smartphone. The difference isn’t huge by any means but in terms of human ergonomics, a extra 7.8mm length is actually very significant. Nicole can just about reach the notifications bar on the G2, but when it comes to the G3, that bar is frustratingly out of reach. This will especially annoy women who may find the G3 a completely different experience in the hand when compared to the G2.
5. Laggy OS Experience
One other major result of a hot phone, is that the processor may be forced to limit performance, effectively reverting to turning off cores or lowered clock levels to help reduce the heat of the device. Nicole found that the G3 can get quite laggy at times – and this was after a reducing the number of apps installed and adding a fast microSD card – in short ensuring that the phone was well equipped to operate at peak performance levels. The LG G3 however, still refused to present that smooth Android Kit Kat experience we have come to expect.
The LG G3 has a really great UI that is colorful, elegant, well thought and brings many features that we have come to admire, including a very intelligent keyboard. The user experience does falter due to a handicapped processor.
LG G3: A Hot Issue?
The LG G3 has its fans, among them our very own Roland who has lots of great things to say about the device in our full G3 review. But many of the issues we see here today are heat related. Nicole concludes that perhaps the problem is that we live here in Taiwan, and we have been appraising the device in Summertime.
If you are a G3 user and you really like the device, or if you are suffering the same agony that we have encountered at times, be sure to let us know in the comments below.
The post Why I love the LG G2 more than the LG G3 appeared first on Mobile Geeks.
