The key to LG selling its G6 smartphone is having features that are not matched by the competition.
The company has always struggled to cut an identity of its own in the market. The G4 had horrible leather backs that didn’t fit with the electronic age. The G5 had ‘‘friends’’ — a series of clip-in devices such as a 360-degree camera and extra battery. If you didn’t like the phone, maybe you’d like the friends ecosystem. That didn’t fly either.
Fortunately LG has gone back to basics with a moderately sized glass and metal phone that’s attractive and easy to hold. It runs a mostly unmodified version of Android Nougat — Google’s latest operating system.
It should do moderately well in the market. I say moderately because it isn’t as feature-rich as, say, the newly released Galaxy S8. Coming from a lower customer base, LG should seek to build loyalty by making it, say, $300 cheaper than the main competition.
If you’re quick and buy the G6 from Telstra before May 10, you’ll snare a free 43-inch OLED TV under certain conditions. But the G6’s RRP is around the same as the competition.
Samsung’s Galaxy S8 starts at $1199, and iPhone 7 and Google Pixel costs $1079 and the G6 $1008 outright. If it were to cost $800 or $700, the G6 would do pretty well as it does have some features that might get you to consider a switch.
It feels smaller
Google’s excellent Pixel phone, for example, isn’t waterproof and dustproof. The G6 is rated IP68 and IPX5 water and dust resistant. You can’t expand Pixel’s storage with a microSD card. You can with the G6.
It’s significantly shorter and narrower than an iPhone 7 Plus yet has a bigger display: 5.7 inches vs 5.5 inches. It feels like a smaller phone.
The G6 also has a higher resolution screen than an iPhone: QHD +, which is a slightly longer version of 2K: 1440 x 2880 pixels at 564 pixels per inch versus an iPhone’s 1080p at 401 ppi.
When I loaded 2K and 4K content on the G6 it looked crisp and sharp.
The G6 has an IPS LCD display rather than the better AMOLED variety found on Samsung phones. It’s odd that LG, which has the best OLED TV displays, hasn’t carried this passion over into smartphones. But you do get Dolby Vision and HDR-10 for better defined images.
Another downside of IPS is that you can’t use a Google Daydream View virtual reality headset.
The really unusual feature of the display is its aspect ratio: it’s 18:9 (2:1), which equates to an even wider viewing experience than the current wide-screen 16:9. There is a proposal to merge wide-screen with the theatrical release film standard 2.20:1 to get rid of cropping and this 2:1 “Univisium” standard is a compromise. But most current video isn’t in Univisium format so when you play video on the G6, there’s room for the home/back/menu buttons on the edge.
If you want to enact the wider Univisium format, you activate “app scaling” in the display settings. The marginally wider format is good but nothing that blows you away and for now there’s very little media available.
A 2:1 screen has other uses. It can be divided into two perfect squares that offer a little extra width for split screen apps.
A lot of Android phones have their home button and fingerprint reader on the back, and the G6 follows this trend. I had no problem picking up the phone and placing my index finger on the home button to authenticate and unlock it. But I do miss not unlocking the phone easily when it’s sitting on a table. However, LG does have a ‘‘knock code’’ you can set up to make this easier.
Not top horsepower
The G6 isn’t the most powerful of recent phones. It’s AnTuTu bench test result was 136196, which is down the AnTuTu ranking list, including below the LG G5 but level with the Galaxy S7. It uses last year’s Snapdragon 821 processor rather than this year’s Snapdragon 835 found on the S8.
Like its rivals, the G6 can be fast charged with a USB-Type C adaptor and yes, there’s a socket for a regular 3.5mm audio plug.
The G6 has Google’s personal assistant. As soon as I connected the G6 to my home WiFi network, it could control Philips Hue lights linked to the network with Google Home.
LG has sunk much effort into the camera. There are two 13-megapixel back-facing lenses and one is wide-screen. Further, you can pinch or zoom to move from one camera to the other seamlessly. You can also take wide-screen selfies, but this is optically produced as there is only one front-facing lens.
A word of caution: it’s harder to grip the phone to take photos due to an almost non existent bezel. You need to grip the phone by the tiny bottom lip with your left hand and press the volume-down button at the top right side.
The camera options offer some fun photography. Selecting square photos brings up options such as ‘‘snap shot’’, which lets you simultaneously view the most recent photo you took while taking another.
‘‘Match shot’’ combines front and rear images, and ‘‘grid shot’’ takes a lattice of images you can post as a single snap. For regular photos, there’s panoramas, 360-degree panoramas, slow-mo, time-lapse and a pop-out mode that combines images from the wide and regular lens. There’s also a ‘‘food mode’’. But at only 5MP the selfie camera falls behind high-end competitors.
Overall LG has produced a much improved premium phone. It may not be as sophisticated as the Galaxy S8 but there’s plenty here to please the punters.
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