LG today held its annual Tech Fest in Delhi, where it showcased close to 232 new devices in India. The South-Korean displayed its new LG G Pro 2 smartphone at the event, along with the newly launched wearable Lifeband Touch. Also on display were LG’s new Ultra HD and OLED TVs, along with the LG G Pad 8.3 which is yet to be released in India. LG, however, did not confirm prices or the release date for any new devices for the Indian market. We did get out hands on the G Pro 2 though and here are our first impressions of the flagship phablet from LG.
Design
The LG G Pro 2 has a 5.9-inch display and resembles LG’s G2. LG has managed to keep things manageable with the extra slim bezel of 3.3mm. The back cover has matte carbon fibre coasting which makes sure it doesn’t look too plasticky or cheap. Given the number of phablets that are already available in the market, the LG G Pro 2 doesn’t stand out significantly in terms of the design. Like the G2, the G Pro 2 has a button-less front. LG has instead put all the buttons on the rear, underneath the camera and this looks much neater at least as far as design element is concerned. The only problem with such a setup is that unless you’ve been a G2 user, you’re likely to take a while remembering that the buttons are on the back.
Processor and Screen
This is one massive phablet and the display is Full HD with IPS. According to LG, the G Pro 2 offers an industry-leading screen-to-frame ratio of 77.2 percent. As far as screens go, Full HD is now the norm where premium smartphones are concerned, and LG’s device will certainly appeal to all those phablet lovers. If you want a smaller screen smartphone, you might want to wait for the LG G2 mini.
The back panel has a matte finish (Image: Shruti Dhapola)
The smartphone has a Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 SoC with the quad-core CPU clocked at 2.26 GHz and an Adreno 330 GPU. It also has 3GB of DDR3 RAM, and there are two versions of the device with 16 and 32GB internal storage. In terms of the competition, the LG G Pro 2 does offer more RAM than the recently revealed Samsung Galaxy S5. The memory is expandable with a microSD slot, thus giving users ample potential storage.
Traditionally with such high-end specs, you shouldn’t have to worry about lag. However, when we tried the device it was a little slow to respond to our touch. According to the person at the booth, this was because the phone was charging and the particular device was facing some issues. It did improve in terms of response when it was disconnected from the charging point, so it could be faulty earthing.
Camera
Unlike Sony and Samsung, LG hasn’t gone all out in the megapixel department, and the G Pro 2 has a 13-megapixel camera with a large Optical Image Stabilisation module, like the G2. It also has a 2.1-megapixel front-facing camera. The LG G Pro 2 is also able to record 4K video with stabilization and 120fps slow-motion footage in HD.
The G Pro 2 looks very much like recent LG high-end phones. (Image: Shruti Dhapola)
As far as cameras go, this is as good as any smartphone camera without or without the extra pixels. One of the interesting features of the camera was the ability to Refocus after the image is shot. You could shoot an image and choose where you can the focus to be sharpest after it’s taken. It’s a pretty handy feature to have in a smartphone camera, which tend to be erratic.
Some other features of the smartphone’s camera include natural flash, which offers a much more balanced colour temperature and exposure compared to a normal flash, resulting in a most natural image. There’s a also a flash for selfies where the size of the preview screen is reduced and a bright white background for more “soft” lighting is added. It also has a burst mode which takes up to 20 continuous shots and automatically edits them to create a video of the captured images.
Battery, OS and other features
The LG G Pro 2 has a 3,200mAh removable battery, which LG says is ‘long lasting’. Given that it hasn’t given a rated time for standby or talk time, it’s hard to tell what LG means by that.
As far as OS goes, the smartphone runs Android 4.4 KitKat out of the box but with LG’s customisations. LG introduced a Knock Code feature with the smartphone and users can unlock their phone without looking at the screen, if they get the knocking right. It lets users tap on any portion of an invisible grid to unlock the phone; LG says there are 86,000 different unlocking combination. We tried out the Knock Code feature, but hitting the exact combination takes a while getting used to. LG also has retained the KnockOn feature where you can simply double tap on an empty portion of the screen to turn it off or on.
The near six-inch display should appeal to phablet lovers. (Image: Shruti Dhapola)
It should also be noted that LG’s G Pro 2 is a 4G LTE enabled device, and should be compatible with Indian networks. For sound, it has a high-power 1W Hi-Fi sound system, though we couldn’t test its credentials at the event.
Bottom line
The LG G Pro 2′s pricing and availability for India were not revealed. From what we heard at the event, the device could be launched by late March or early April and could be priced close to Rs 50,000. This is of course tentative, given that LG wasn’t too keen to comment on a price just yet, but it’s unlikely that a premium smartphone would launch for under Rs 40,000. If LG does it price under Rs 40,000, it makes sense for users to consider it. However we don’t know how appealing a Rs 50,000 smartphone would be, given that the market is full of cheaper options. The LG G Pro 2 will appeal to phablet lovers, but the success of the smartphone will depend on the price in India.
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