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| LG G5 Battery Life |
| Removable but Less Than Stellar |
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The LG G5’s saving grace is the fact that its 2800mAh battery is easily replaceable on the go, a rarity for flagships in 2016. To see how it holds up against the competition, we turn to AnTuTu’s Battery Tester benchmark. This test gives phones a beating by cranking up the screen brightness and looping through a variety of workloads until their battery cries uncle.
LG G5 owners are going to be taking advantage of the replaceable battery more frequently than they might hope here. The G5 brings in one of the worst scores we have seen from a flagship in recent years. Thankfully,
Quick Charge 3.0 does make up for a bit with charging to 80% in about 35 minutes, though it’s a shame to see it not support the Qi wireless charging standard.
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| LG G5 Final Thoughts |
| A Good Phone With Limited Potential |
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The LG G5 is simply too ambitious for its own good. Through all of its module swapping and other clever tricks, it gives the impression of a premium prototype rather than a polished flagship.
Compared with the
Moto Z family’s pop-on and pop-off mod system, the LG G5’s modules feel more like an afterthought. The cumbersome process of swapping out LG Friends makes you think twice before committing to do it. At the very least, LG’s mods have the potential to be significantly smaller than Moto’s, which necessarily fill the footprint of the entire phone - they just need a compelling reason to be used in the first place.
Overlooking the mods, however, we find a phone with a lot of potential. It’s a great performer with a favorably compact chassis, MicroSD slot, and a removable battery. We wish LG had scrapped the modularity in favor of a little more refinement to things like the dual lens experience - a fantastic idea on paper - and poor battery life.
By all means, the LG G5 is still a good phone worthy of consideration if it appeals to your sense of style, just do yourself a favor and don't buy it for the module add-ons.
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- Sleek metal body
- Solid, reliable performance
- Bright display
- Removable battery and SD card slot
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- Janky dual-camera system
- Clumsy process to swap modules
- Inaccurate fingerprint sensor
- Mediocre battery life
- Subpar fit and finish
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