Browsing your local mobile phone emporium, it's hard not to feel a slight twinge of regret that we're no longer blessed with the kind of variety that typified the "feature" phone era; that wild and often unpredictable age before Apple and Google dominated the landscape and big-screen mobiles were the norm. Firms like Nokia, Samsung, Siemens, Sony Ericsson and Sagem weren't afraid to experiment with their handsets, creating products which desperately tried to differentiate themselves from their rivals in weird and wonderful ways. There was a joyful creativity at work, sadly absent from the modern smartphone sector. Today's handsets tend to follow a rigid template and any new idea that comes to market is quickly adopted by practically every manufacturer out of fear of being left behind. However, it would seem that LG - tired of sitting in the shadow of its competitors - has finally woken up to the value of offering something drastically different; the result is the G5, without a shadow of a doubt one of the most interesting phones we've seen in years.
The G5's gimmick is that it boasts a modular design, allowing the user to add special units - whimsically referred to by LG as "Friends" - to the bottom of the handset, augmenting it with additional features which, on any other device, would require an entire hardware refresh. The process of swapping out a module is simple; there's a small button on the lower-left edge of the phone and pressing this with your fingernail releases the bottom section, which also contains the speaker, microphone and USB Type-C charging port. Sliding this away from the main body of the phone reveals that the battery is also connected, and this has to be snapped off and fixed to another module before re-attaching it to the G5. The entire process takes seconds, and while the phone obviously turns off the moment the battery is removed, the boot time is thankfully quick. It's a neat trick and swiftly replacing a module in front of your friends is likely to garner more impressed glances than befuddled ones, but there are some niggles - on the unit we reviewed, the left-hand side of the module refused to fit flush against the body of the phone, leaving a noticeable gap.
Powered by Qualcomm's new Snapdragon 820 chipset and boasting 4GB of RAM, the G5 is no slouch when it comes to pure processing power. 32GB of storage is the standard, and while a MicroSD card slot is present, you can't "adopt" expandable memory into the internal total, as LG has decided against enabling this Android 6.0 feature. The G5's modular design sets it apart from other phones on the market; the bottom of the device pops off and can be replaced with other modules that add functionality. The 2800 mAh battery is also replaceable - something which is rare in the Android sector these days.
0 comments:
Post a Comment