LG G2 (AT&T) Review

How big do you want it? The latest Android-powered superphone, the LG G2 is the most phone possible right now, with a 5.2-inch screen in a barely handheld form factor. And while its processor and hardware are superior to Samsung's industry-leading 5-inch Galaxy S4($199.99 at Samsung), a few bugs and rough edges cause it to fall just short of replacing it as our AT&T Editors' Choice.

Physical Features
The LG G2 manages to get a 5.2-inch screen in roughly the same form factor as the Samsung Galaxy S4, with its 5-inch display. How, you ask? By making the screen nearly bezel-free, and throwing the volume and power controls. The result is a handset that still feels like it's phone-sized, but with the largest possible screen. That said, it's a tiny bit wider than the GS 4 at 2.8 inches, and genuinely too wide for me to consider a one-handed phone; the 2.57-inch Moto X($179.99 at Amazon) fits much more naturally in my hand.

So how about those rear-mounted buttons? They aren't too bad—on this model. I mostly woke up the phone by tapping twice on the screen, something LG calls "knock-on." (It worked about 80 percent of the time; sometimes, it took four taps.) Liberated from having to find the power button between the volume buttons, I could just focus on the volume controls, which are easy to find by touch. This isn't the case with all the carrier models, by the way: The Verizon model's buttons are harder to use without looking.

Otherwise, this is a very sealed box. The battery isn't user replaceable, and there's no memory card slot; the only visible ports are the micro USB port and headphone jack, both on the bottom panel. The phone is encased in shiny, but fortunately not unpleasantly slippery, plastic.

The G2's bright, 1080p IPS LCD screen is just lovely. Colors are truer and a bit less saturated than on the Galaxy S4's OLED. A colored LED above the screen blinks with notifications. It's customizable, of course.

There are no physical buttons on the front face of the phone, and you can customize the virtual home and menu buttons to "right-handed" or "left-handed" order. That said, I still prefer the physical button on the Galaxy S4.

Voice Quality and Battery Life
Signal strength is very good on the LG G2, but the Samsung Galaxy S4 has better voice quality. The earpiece is loud enough, although transmissions over the AT&T network sounded a bit fuzzy on the other end. The phone's noise cancellation worked, but introduced a slightly staticky tone that I also heard in transmissions through the speakerphone, which is of middling volume.

I found LG's Voice Mate voice assistant disappointing after using Google Now on the Moto X. While Voice Mate advertised voice activation from the lock screen like the X has, I just couldn't get that to work. Basic voice dialing worked fine, but free-text queries resulted in answers ranging from irrelevant to weird. "Where can I get Mexican food near here?" gave me "My favorite one is electricity." "Show me reviews of the LG G2 smartphone" gave me "No call logs apps found." I'd stick with dialing here.

The G2 is kitted out with all the latest wireless technologies. It supports AT&T's LTE network, as well as AT&T's and foreign HSPA networks. It has Bluetooth 4.0, Wi-Fi 802.11ac, GPS and NFC. It connected to a 5GHz Wi-Fi 802.11n network without a problem, as well as to a Plantronics Voyager Legend Bluetooth headset, including activating voice dialing. The GPS locked in quickly and easily. When I got AT&T LTE service, I saw some of the fastest speeds I've gotten in Manhattan—more than 30Mbps down—but there was a catch, in that at one point, the phone couldn't climb up from HSPA to LTE and needed to be bumped into Airplane Mode to locate the network again.

LG has its own battery chemistry department, which lets it include a 3000mAh cell, the biggest we've seen in a phone this size. That led to nearly sixteen hours of talk time, also the best battery life result we've seen in a phone this size.

Android, Performance and Skin
The G2 is the first phone we've tested with Qualcomm's new quad-core, 2.27GHz Snapdragon 800 processor, but Android 4.2.2 with LG's skin looks like a little bit of a drag here. I'm saying a little bit—the LG benchmarked similarly to other top phones, but I was surprised it didn't do better.

The G2 aced raw processor benchmarks. And on the GFXBench graphics benchmark, which maps pretty closely to high-end gaming, the G2 beat all competitors with 50 frame-per-second on-screen performance. That makes for great gaming, which I saw by playing Asphalt 7 and Need for Speed: Most Wanted.

But on browser benchmarks Browsermark and Sunspider, the Samsung Galaxy S4 (also using Chrome) and iPhone 5 running Apple's iOS 7 both beat the G2. The screen transitions in the UI are also pretty aggressively animated, making them look slightly less snappy than on less-enhanced phones like the Moto X.

And I had minor stability issues with my AT&T G2. Both Need for Speed and Asphalt 7 crashed, once each. That isn't encouraging.

Could Android 4.3, or even 4.4 offer better performance? Maybe—as of now, the G2 is two versions old, with an upgrade coming in the hazy future. Of course, that's the case for almost every Android phone out there.

Like Samsung, LG can't help but "enhance" Android with a ton of new features. Some work. Some don't. Some are creepy. The ability to change the system fonts, icons and icon sizes is a natural outgrowth of Android's customization. "Smart screen" and "smart video" are similar to Samsung's features, keeping the screen on when you are paying attention and turning it off when you look away.

LG's approach to multitasking is more flexible than Samsung's, but supports fewer apps. You can spawn video playback, phone, messaging, calendar, LG's email app, the notepad, file manager or calculator—but weirdly not the Web browser—into a resizable little window on the screen over whatever else you're doing. I say "weirdly" here because the international version lets you spawn a browser—the AT&T version just doesn't.

There is so much bloatware on this phone that it's dizzying. Some of it is interesting, some of it is annoying, and all of it is undeletable. The first eight icons in the app drawer are all AT&T preloads. For more useful stuff, I'd call out LG's battery manager and data manger, which help you predict how much remaining usage time you have and help you avoid busting your data cap. LG's Quick Remote IR remote app is also better than Samsung's, because along with TVs and such, it also controls air conditioners. Guest Mode brings a protected "kid mode" only able to run certain apps. For creepy, try Life Square, which collects every action you take on your phone into a timeline, so you can stalk yourself. 

Much of this stuff is interesting; I just wish you had a choice whether to install it or not.

Camera and Conclusions

Camera and Multimedia
The G2 comes with only 24.12GB of its internal 32GB free, thanks to plenty of bloatware. 

The 13-megapixel camera looks and feels like a pared-down version of Samsung's. The controls are bigger and clearer, and there are fewer specialty modes, but LG picked the best: picture-in-picture, burst, HDR, panorama, and "eraser mode."

Picture quality is good but not great. In good light, you get good photographs, but the G2 will white out a bright sky (even with HDR on, oddly enough.) In low light, it was difficult to stop blur, especially in the front camera. The iPhone 5, Nokia Lumia 1020($199.99 at Amazon) and HTC One all perform better.

There's also a potential usability bug with the shutter button. The down-volume key activates the camera when held down, even from the lock screen. That's convenient, but it's easy to jostle accidentally in your bag; one day, the G2 took 81 photos of the inside of my bag. The only solution I could find was to change the volume key to mean "zoom" instead of "capture," but I couldn't find the setting to disable it entirely.

Videos are gorgeous. The G2 uses optical image stabilization like Nokia's Lumia phones do, which results in gorgeous 29-to-30-frame-per-second, 1080p videos indoors and out. Yes, you do still have to hold the camera steady, and it occasionally shifts focus, but it's top-notch as phone videos go. There's also a 60-frame-per-second, 1080p mode (in our tests, it got 55 fps)—it isn't a slow-motion mode like on the iPhone 5S or Samsung phones, it's just smoother.

The video player handled all of our formats (including DivX and Xvid) up to 1080p; with Qslide, it floats the videos over other content or applications, as well. I really like the video player's layout, which shows your videos as large, clear thumbnails.

LG advertises the G2 as having better music fidelity than other phones, but not many people have truly high-quality music files. With our standard test suite, including MP3, AAC, WMA and OGG files up to 320kbps, music sounded clear and well-balanced, including over a Bluetooth headset. There's a seven-band equalizer if you want to boost the bass.

Comparisons and Conclusions
LG has taken many of the concepts Samsung introduced with the Galaxy S4 and refined them. The G2 is the epitome of the "big phone," a huge beautiful window on the Internet, still barely useable with a single hand, even for those with large hands. The G2 has slightly higher-end hardware than the S4, and I like LG's approach to software a bit better than Samsung's. Rather than overwhelm you with thousands of features, extra media stores, and such, LG focuses on multitasking and customization.

That said, I'm leaving our general Editors' Choice with the Galaxy S4 for three reasons. First, the G2's superior processor doesn't seem to be showing up in browser performance. Second, the phone has a bunch of minor bugs. And finally, I want to draw a line under these super-wide phones. LG doesn't want the G2 to be seen as a phablet, which is all well and good, but if that's the case, they need to pay some attention to the width of the human hand.

LG G2 (AT&T)

4.0

Check Stock

$375.99 at Amazon

MSRP $199.99

Pros

• Excellent battery life.
• Huge screen.
• Super-fast processor.
• Multitasking.

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Cons

• Processor benefit doesn't play out in apps.
• Some bugs.
• Not the best voice quality.

The Bottom Line

The Android-powered LG G2 is both super-sized and super-powerful, but it doesn't quite have the chops to unseat the mighty Galaxy S4 as our Editors' Choice smartphone on AT&T.