LG revisits the curve LG G Flex 2 review

LG revisits the curve, and steps it up with high-caliber hardware – LG G Flex 2 review

With its new G Flex 2, LG went back to its curved drawing board, corrected all the missteps of the original G Flex — namely its unwieldy size and unimpressive 720p display — and delivered a marquee-worthy device. Equipping it with a crystal-clear 1080p touchscreen and the latest quad-core Snapdragon 810 processor from Qualcomm, the company managed to elevate its arched handset from a gimmick (as some saw it) to an arched handset you actually want, regardless of its shape.

Such a task doesn’t come easy for LG. Despite steadily pumping out premium phones like the G Pro 2, Google Nexus 5 and G3, LG has had difficulty carving a place for itself in the Android market. Its devices lacked the sophisticate aesthetic of the HTC One series, the quirky customization incentives of Motorola, and the brand awareness of Samsung, which overshadows all these companies. For a while, it seemed that LG was bound to be without a hero phone that could set itself apart.

That is, until the G Flex 2.

With this high-end handset, LG isn’t holding much back. And while it’s best for you to wait until the other mobile giants announce their flagships in the coming weeks at MWC 2015 so you’re fully informed of this year’s options, it’s clear that with the G Flex 2, LG will give its rivals a run for their money.

Availability

The G Flex 2 has already launched in Korea, and will soon be available for pre-order on February 27 in Singapore. In the US, AT&T, Sprint and US Cellular have announced plans to carry the device, with the latter estimating a spring timeline. In the UK, Vodafone will stock it exclusively for six weeks after launch. Availability in Australia is yet to be announced.

LG G Flex 2 review – Design

With a premium aesthetic that feels incredibly luxe, the handset comes in platinum silver and flamenco red. Compared to its predecessor, the phone is smaller, thinner, and 15 percent lighter. It measures 5.9 inches tall and 3 inches wide, has a profile of 0.3 to 0.4 inches at the thickest (149 by 75 by 7.1 to 9.4mm), and weighs 5.4 ounces (152 grams).

As a result of this reworked size, the G Flex 2 is now much more manageable in your hand and easier to maneuver. It still won’t be a comfortable fit in your jean pockets, but unlike the unwieldy G Flex, this iteration is easier to hold vertically during calls and horizontally while watching videos.

Though not a rugged device by any means, the handset is designed to withstand a certain degree of abuse. When it’s facing down, you can push against or step on its apex to flatten it straight; and when it’s facing upward, you can press down its curling edges. After doing this intermittently throughout the week (totaling to about a couple dozen times altogether) with both slow aplomb and frantic rapid-fire movements, my review unit bent back to its original shape without difficulty.

Similar to the original, the phone’s battery door is layered with a slick protective coating, not unlike the ones you find on cars. During my time with the G Flex 2, it had no problem fending off everyday scuffs and scratches. LG says the “self-healing” coat mends itself faster than before, but I didn’t notice much of a difference. In any case, it worked well enough that there were no marks left after I scratched my car keys over it several times and clawed my nails across it.

LG doesn’t claim that this veneer is impenetrable, however. Slice an X-Acto knife, or in my case, jagged rocks across the device, and it will leave a scar. (Oops, go figure.) Fortunately, I don’t usually sweep my handset across a bed of craggy rocks, and unless you’re aiming to give the phone a beating, the G Flex 2 can sustain your regular dose of wear and tear.

Screen

LG reported that due to an in-house chemical treatment, it has made the device’s Gorilla Glass touchscreen 20 percent stronger. But I believe the display’s biggest improvement is in its resolution. I was disappointed that the first generation had only a 720p resolution, but that has now been bumped up to 1080p. And given the screen’s size has decreased (it now measures 5.5 inches instead of 6), it has a higher pixel density of 403ppi.

The result is a noticeably sharper display. Images, videos and text are bright and rich in detail. The screen is easily viewable in sunlight with the brightness turned all the way up, it has a wide viewing angle, and it’s responsive as well.

Though the handset’s distinctive 23-degree arc doesn’t appear as prominent as in the original G Flex, the curve still does well to lend a more immersive viewing experience. Don’t get me wrong — there’s no need to throw out your flat phone for a curved one anytime soon. But by pulling in the sides closer together, you end up feeling a bit more drawn in. For me, watching movies, flipping through the photo gallery and even scrolling down Web pages became a touch more engrossing.

LG G Flex 2 Review – Software features

The G Flex 2 ships with Google’s latest mobile OS, Android 5.0 Lollipop (version 5.0.1 to be exact), with software goodies like notifications on the lock screen, and a richer approach to recent apps known as Overview that you can access by tapping on the square hotkey. Our unit had the usual lineup of Google software, like the Chrome browser, Gmail, the Play Store, Hangouts, Drive and Maps. It also had a slew of Korean apps that are likely exclusive to this variant only.

Layered on top of Android is LG’s user interface. While the company got rid of some software features seen in the device’s first iteration such as a “swinging” lock screen and QTheater (both of which were pretty useless anyway), others have been retained. Smart Notice, for example, is a digital assistant that displays notification cards to help inform users of calendar events, weather alerts and other tasks (like deleting any long unused apps or returning a missed call).

There’s also Dual Window, which you launch by either long-pressing the triangular back hotkey or selecting “Dual Window” after hitting the Overview hotkey. A small menu of apps appears, wherein you can choose two apps to “split screen” and use simultaneously.

LG also includes KnockOn and KnockCode, which let you wake up or unlock the handset with various tapping gestures directly from a sleeping lock screen. One new lock screen characteristic is GlanceView. By swiping your finger downward from the top of the display, GlanceView allows you to quickly check the time, date and any missed notifications, without having to wake up the phone.

The G Flex 2 has Bluetooth 4.1, NFC and two different storage options (16 and 32GB). It includes either 2 or 3GB of RAM depending on availability, and like some variants of the G3, the device has a microSD card slot that’s expandable up to 2TB. But don’t jump for joy just yet; no one’s really mass producing 2TB microSD cards, and the largest one you’ll likely see on the current market is 128GB.

Camera and video

Photo quality for the G Flex 2’s 13-megapixel shooter was respectable — auto-focus was sharp when it locked onto an object, the shutter was fast and responsive, and the camera retained a good amount of fine detail when zooming into a photo.

On the whole, however, I wasn’t too impressed with the camera. Though colors were accurate for the most part, they could come off muted and washed out. Macro-focus took a while to latch onto an object up close, and I wasn’t always guaranteed a super-sharp picture afterward. Indeed, photography enthusiasts might not be too enthused, but it performs well enough for everyday, casual snapshots. For more details on picture quality, click on each image below to see them at their full resolution.

The pink and purple flowers look appealing, but the white ones in this bouquet (taken indoors) are washed out.

Shooting in 4K video on the rear camera was satisfactory as well. The camera adjusted fluidly and quickly for different focus points and lighting situations. Both moving and still objects were sharp with distinct outlines, colors were true-to-life, and there was no noticeable lag behind my moving of the camera and the onscreen viewfinder. Nearby and distant audio also picked up well without any odd extraneous noises.

Both the rear and 2.1-megapixel cameras have HDR shooting, voice-activated shutters, timers and burst shot, which groups together several photos taken in quick succession. You can pause recording and take pictures while shooting video on either cameras. There’s also a “dual camera” mode that lets you take pictures or record video with both cameras at the same time. These images can be split right down the middle, or in a little rectangular window. If you want to have a little more fun with it, the window is resizable and movable, and can come in other shapes like a heart, a postage stamp or a Polaroid. To switch between cameras, swipe across the display in any direction.

Like the G3, the rear camera has a laser-guided auto-focus, dual flashes on the back, and optical image stabilization, which reduces motion blur if you accidentally take a photo with an unsteady hand. The camera has an 8x digital zoom, panorama shooting, a gridline overlay to help compose pictures and four sizing options (ranging from 2,048×1,536- to 4,160×3,120-pixel resolution). It can record HD, full HD or ultra-HD 2160p video, as well as slow-motion at 120fps.

The 2.1-megapixel front-facing shooter has several features to help improve the quality of your self-portraits. For instance, there’s a “beauty meter” that can soften and smooth a particularly harsh-looking selfie, and it can automatically flip images vertically. As we saw before in the G Pro 2, there’s a faux-flash tool that appears as a bright, thick peach border around the photo preview. The idea is to maximize the light emanating from the touchscreen to help brighten up your pictures. Like the G3, you can activate the camera shutter touch-free by making an open-hand gesture and then closing it into a fist.

Lastly, due to the popularity of selfie sticks, the device can now sense whenever it’s being lowered from on high by a stick or a raised arm. When it picks up on this movement after a photo has been taken, a preview of the recently taken image appears without you having to manually check. It can then switch back to camera mode after it senses itself being moved away from your face.

When I tried this out, the handset didn’t have the easiest time recognizing this particular motion from my arm. There were a couple of times when I moved the phone back down to eye-level after taking a picture and nothing happened. I suspect because this gesture can be executed quite swiftly. On the occasions that it did work, it did save me an extra tap or two, but I suspect my movements were registered because they were unnaturally dramatic, and I placed the screen closer to my face than I normally would.

LG G Flex 2 Review – Performance

Call quality

Because I had an unlocked Korean handset, the phone isn’t optimized for any US carrier. But by using an AT&T SIM card, I was able to test the G Flex 2 on the carrier’s network at our San Francisco offices. Call quality was steady and clear. Although my calling partner came off a bit muffled, his voice sounded accurate and easy to make out. I didn’t pick up on any extraneous buzzing or static on the other line, none of my calls dropped, and audio didn’t clip in and out. Likewise, my partner told me that I sounded clear as well, and that connection was consistent and strong on his end.

Data speeds, processing speed and battery life

Despite not being a carrier-optimized phone, 4G LTE speeds were quite fast and consistent. For Web browsing, it took about 2 seconds to load CNET’s mobile site and 6 seconds to load the desktop version. The New York Times’ mobile and desktop sites loaded in 8 and 4 seconds, respectively. The mobile site for ESPN clocked in at 4 seconds, and 6 seconds passed before its desktop site fully loaded.

LG G Flex 2 review (unlocked) performance times

Average 4G LTE download rate	22.97Mbps
Average 4G LTE upload rate	18.22Mbps
Temple Run 2 app download (44.52MB)	42 seconds
CNET mobile site load	2 seconds
CNET desktop site load	6 seconds
Restart time	50 seconds
Camera boot time	2.94 seconds

After five trials on Ookla’s speed test app, I calculated a mean download rate of 22.97Mbps down and 18.22Mbps up. The 44.76MB game Temple Run 2 took 42 seconds to download and install, and lastly, it took an average of 10 minutes and 19 seconds to download the movie “Gravity,” which was 1.3GB. Of course, data speeds depend on many variables, including your location and time of day, so don’t be surprised if your personal experience from your network ends up differing from the results I’ve described.

This G Flex 2 joins the ranks of Samsung’s Korean-exclusive Galaxy Note 4 as one of the first few mobile devices to include the powerful Snapdragon 810 quad-core processor from Qualcomm. The 64-bit octa-core CPU has a clock speed of 2GHz, and delivers smooth gameplay and graphics rendering. Indeed, while playing the simple perpetual running game Temple Run 2, or more graphics-intensive games such as Riptide GP 2, content loaded quickly and I saw fluid animations, high frame rates and rich image detail.

Benchmark tests mirrored this experience. The handset had a multi-thread Linpack score of 583.622 MFLOPs in 0.29 seconds. This is a typical score for high-end phones, though it is lower than flagships such as the LG G3, Motorola Droid Turbo and HTC One M8 have scored in the past. (Those three reached a range of 600-880 MFLOPs.) The G Flex 2’s best Quadrant score, however, was an impressive 29,155, which is the best handset result we have on record. For instance, the G3, Droid Turbo, Samsung Galaxy S5 and the One M8 scored 23,103, 22,642, 23,707 and 24,593, respectively.

Given these high results, however, there were occasions when I found the device to be surprisingly slow. Daily tasks, such as calling up the keyboard, opening a new tab in Chrome, launching recent apps, opening the camera app (which on average took 2.94 seconds) or returning to the home page, all took just slightly longer than usual. True, it only felt like a half a tick longer, but it was still noticeable.

LG is currently aware of this issue and expects to solve this problem in the following weeks during the handset’s launch in other major countries, and released this official statement:

“The devices sampled are representative of final industrial design and user experience but are continuing to undergo additional optimizations to enhance benchmark performance. We expect our upcoming software releases to provide further improvements in this area. We remain confident that the G Flex 2 will deliver great experiences to our customers with a tremendous blend of multimedia, performance and industry-leading design.”

You can expect that we’ll revisit this piece with additional analysis as soon as LG has rolled out its update.

Powering the phone is a 3,000mAh battery. Though its predecessor had a slightly bigger 3,500mAh battery (and T-Mobile’s variant had a 3,400mAh battery), LG reports that battery performance has altogether improved. It claims that the G Flex 2 can regain 50 percent of its juice in under 40 minutes with the stock charger. My personal observation was pretty close to that — it took my unit about 45 minutes.

During our lab tests, the battery lasted 10 hours and 37 minutes for video playback. That’s a decent amount of juice to provide continuously, but compared to the original Flex (which clocked over 17 hours), that’s a notable amount of usage hours lost due to the lowered capacity.

LG G Flex 2 Review – Conclusion

The LG G Flex 2 has what it takes to compete in this year’s smartphone arms race. Other than the Korean-exclusive Galaxy Note 4, the device is the only other handset to feature the lightning fast quad-core Snapdragon 810 processor; it has the latest Android 5.0 software; and it sports a durable, flexible design. And while you won’t truly miss anything by having a phone with a flat touchscreen, the G Flex 2’s curved display, coupled with a 1080p resolution, can draw you in with a more enveloping viewing experience.

That said, whether you should buy the device depends on two big unknowns: LG has yet to announce pricing (except for that off-contract $504 price that only Sprint reported so far) and carrier availability, and we’re waiting for that promised software update. To be a real contender, the handset needs to be on as many carriers as the Samsung Galaxy series, and fetch a competitive price. It also goes without saying that the software update will need to roll out soon and work successfully.

If LG can check both of those boxes and you’re yearning for a conversation-piece phone with plenty of power, then give the G Flex 2 a serious look. Of course, with Samsung and HTC expected to announce the Galaxy S6 and One M9, respectively, in a couple of weeks at MWC 2015, it’s best to hold off on buying any flagship at the moment if you want to make sure you have the latest and greatest.

The Good The LG G Flex 2 sports a uniquely immersive and comfortable arched design, a sharp 1080p display, the latest Snapdragon 810 processor and a scratch-resistant coating.

The Bad The device’s camera takes muted photos, its battery capacity is smaller than its predecessor, and performance can be slow at times, pending a software update.

The Bottom Line No longer just a daring experiment, the G Flex 2 finally has the killer screen and top-of-the-line processor that its bold design deserves.

LG revisits the curve LG G Flex 2 review