LG Announces the G5: A Real-Life Modular Smartphone
BARCELONA, Spain — In 2016, LG continues to try to piece together a winning smartphone brand.
As part of Mobile World Congress 2016, the Korean company has announced an all-new addition to its flagship line of Android handsets: the LG G5. The new phone adds an innovative modular system for adding custom hardware accessories. But the G5 also sheds some weight in both the software and hardware departments.
Here’s a rundown of what the LG G5 has to offer.
A modular accessory system
The LG G5’s bottom hatch can be replaced with extension modules. (Yahoo Tech)
The G5 has a removable hatch at its bottom, which allows you to swap out the phone’s battery. That part is cool, sure. But the true novelty is that the hatch itself can be replaced with modular accessories to give the G5 extended functionality. Promoted during LG’s announcement for the G5 were the LG CAM Pro extension, providing the phone with a dedicated shutter button and zoom scroll, and the LG Hi-Fi Plus, which adds a second, higher-quality (32-bit) headphone port to the phone’s bottom.
The LG CAM Plus extension. (Yahoo Tech)
LG says it will invite third-party vendors to create their own modular extensions for the G5, opening up possibilities for a kind of modular accessory market. The idea of a plug-and-play modular smartphone isn’t new; the concept has been teased by Google for years. But LG’s G5 — even if it doesn’t have the ability to swap out main components like processors or screens — brings that idea to life.
A screen that’s always on
The phone screen that never goes to sleep. (Yahoo)
The G5 has a 5.3-inch Quad HD (or 2K) screen. Since it’s two-tenths of an inch smaller than the G4’s QHD display, the G5 carries an improved pixel density (or PPI). LG says the G5’s screen is also brighter and particularly more readable in sunlight, thanks to an auto-detecting Daylight Mode.
The most important functional improvement to the new G phone’s screen, though, is probably its Always-on Display. When the phone is asleep, this function shows a minimalistic view of things like the time, your calendar events, and weather. Thanks to its special backlight configuration, Always-on sips battery power, consuming less than 1 percent for every hour it’s on, according to LG.
Two-eyed rear camera. (Yahoo Tech)
The dual-camera attack that LG’s 2015 V10 premium smartphone sported on its selfie side has come to the G5’s rear camera setup. The new phone has a 135-degree wide-angle lens next to a standard lens. Instead of forcing you to choose a shooting mode when snapping a picture, the two cams work together; zooming all the way out in the camera’s viewfinder will automatically switch you live to the wide-angle lens, for instance.
Wrapped in metal, with a fingerprint reader on its back. (Yahoo Tech)
Another hardware feature LG has transplanted to the G5 from a sibling device: the rear fingerprint reader (which LG originated on its Google-branded Nexus 5x). The circle sensor also serves as the phone’s power button, but the volume buttons have been moved back to the side of the phone.
The body of the G5 is wrapped in a metal casing, which makes it feels a bit chunkier than the previous two G phones. I’d guess the extra girth is necessary to accommodate that modular expansion system. LG has also added a slight backward tilt to the top of the phone — above the display, where the earphones plug in — which seems to be purely aesthetic. The phone comes in silver, titan (a dark gray), gold, and pink.
USB Type-C: check! (Yahoo Tech)
A Snapdragon 820 processor powers the G5, providing twice the speed and power efficiency of the G4’s Snapdragon 808. That’s in addition to a bump in the phone’s RAM — from last year’s 3 GB to 4 GB — which should help with multitasking and running large apps. There’s 32 GB of built-in storage, but that’s expandable to 2 TB with a microSD card.
USB Type-C — the future of computer and mobile device connectors — has also migrated to the LG G5 from the Nexus line of Android phones, providing faster charging times and (like iPhone’s Lightning cable) easier plugging.
The phone’s battery is slightly smaller than its G predecessor’s. And though LG hasn’t given direct estimates for how long that battery should last on a charge, we’d guess the typical “one day.”
On the G5, there is no app drawer. Apps are left to live out in the cold. (Yahoo Tech)
The LG UX 5.0 software that runs the G5 is built atop Android 6.0 Marshmallow. The custom OS separates itself from standard Google-issue Android not only by design differences here and there, but also with its deletion of the Android app launcher.
This means that all apps installed on the phone simply live on the device’s home screens, just like on an iPhone. In fact, LG said the decision to get rid of the app drawer was informed by market research that showed customers are “used to the iPhone.”
The cool-cat LG Friends stamp. (Yahoo Tech)
Another LG-only feature baked into the G5 software is setup-free compatibility with LG Friends devices, including the new LG 360 VR headset, the LG 360 CAM, and the LG Rolling Bot (a BB-8-like smartphone-controlled ground drone). While LG Friends devices may be used with most Android phones, only certified LG Friends phones like the G5 can automatically detect and hook up to them right out of the box — you don’t have to go to the Play store to download extra apps.
LG is mostly mum so far on pricing and availability, saying only that the phone should come to most markets this April.
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