Review: LG G2

The LG G2 is the supercomputer of smartphones – at least for the time being. It's the first phone in the U.S. to sport a Snapdragon 800 system-on-a-chip with a quad-core 2.26GHz CPU. It has two gigs of RAM. It has the 4G LTE and the NFC. It may be faster than your computer. All the phones and the processors and the miniaturization and the convergence and the cellular technology in history has been leading up to this phone. Too bad LG's proprietary whistles and bells keep the G2 from being a truly amazing phone.

How much faster could this phone be when launching apps, rendering web pages, and playing games? The answer is none. None more fast. Apps load with no perceivable delay, games act like they're running on a $500 console, and navigation elements respond immediately to your touch as if they were physical objects. It's a damn miracle of science.

The G2's 5.2-inch, 1920 x 1080 display is like a high-end HDTV. At 423 pixels per inch (ppi), the 16:9 IPS display is tack-sharp. The screen and its slim bezel also add up to the perfect size – for my hands, at least. It's big enough to make a positive difference when watching videos, browsing the web, viewing photos, typing, and multitasking, but it's not obnoxiously big. It feels like a phone and not a "phablet," whatever that means. I used it without a case and was surprised at how light and low-key it felt in my pocket. It felt less bulky than an iPhone 4S in a Mophie case.

That screen also comes with the slipperiest coating imaginable, which kicks the smoothness of your scrolling and swiping into high gear. It also presents a trait that I've never encountered in a phone: The coating is slippery enough to make the phone slide off a table, seemingly under its own power, if the table is even the slightest bit crooked (see video below). The phone is capable of slithering around by itself. You can use it as an air-hockey puck on any flat surface.

Thankfully the G2's self-reliance in terms of transportation has no impact on battery life. It doesn't have a user-replaceable battery, but it does have the next best thing: A 3000 mAh battery that lasted up to two days per charge for me. If you're playing games and streaming videos all day long, you may need to recharge it at bedtime. But if you're using it as a productivity device – checking email, using maps, surfing the web, and the occasional game or video/music streaming – the battery can last two days. That's unbelievable for such a big-screened, high-horsepower device.

Smartphones these days have cameras, and the G2 is no exception. There's a very good 13-megapixel main shooter around the back and a front-facing 2.1-megapixel unit for selfies. The main camera is a good performer, and its low-light shots are solid. You'd be hard-pressed to differentiate its results from most of the good smartphone cameras available right now, which is generally a plus.

The main difference with the G2's camera is that it offers the rare benefit of an optical stabilization system. There's also more built-in controls to choose from than most smartphone cameras, including a manual focus slider, ISO adjustments from 100-800, and white-balance presets. Along with the usual cast of characters – six scene modes, HDR mode, and a buggy motion-panorama mode – there are some useful and just-plain-weird shooting modes.

On the useful side is a burst mode that captures 20 consecutive shots in a couple of seconds. Another option, "Time Catch Shot," uses a pre-shutter buffer to capture images before you press the button. On the weird side: "Shot & Clear," which purportedly lets you erase photobombers from your photos (if you can get it to work, which I couldn't). And if you want to cake your face with digital blemish-proofing, be sure to set the camera to "Beauty Shot" mode.

And then there's VR Panorama mode, which is supposed to shoot Photosynth-like 360-degree panoramas but ends up capturing scenes from a Gary Busey fever dream. It's so glitchy that it creates amazing works of art, completely by accident.

In video mode, the optical stabilization system stands out. Instead of the jarring shakiness while you're walking or running, you get a smoother, floaty look. It's not perfect, but it helps. The G2 shoots 1080p video at up to 60fps; you can also decrease the frame rate to 30fps and the resolution to 720p, 320 x 240, or an MMS-friendly 176 x 144. Just remember that when you're in motion and shooting at 1080p/60, resolution suffers a bit. It looks much better when you stay put.

There are three little speakers at the bottom of the phone that pump out loud sound for a smartphone, but you're still gonna get tinny audio with weak bass levels. And while the speakers are down to party, the phone acts like an overprotective parent whenever you plug in headphones. Upon detecting a 3.5mm jack, the system volume goes into tinnitus prevention mode, displaying a "Media volume automatically turned down to protect your ears" message. You can override it with a trip to the Settings > Sound menu, but that's a lot of work just to rock out.

And now for the "marquee" feature of the LG G2: Its back-mounted power and volume buttons. They're supposed to fight fumbles and make using this plus-sized phone more comfortable by forcing your index finger to the back-center of the phone as a third point of support. The button placement isn't a disaster – you'll spend more than 95 percent of the time interacting with the G2's touchscreen, anyway – but the odd button placement doesn't do the phone any favors. You'll get used to it, but not before wishing the buttons were in their traditional places, especially if your hands are big enough to grip it like any other phone.

Even after you get used to the blind button-pressing, there's a big flaw with the setup. The volume-up button is located very close to the camera lens, so you'll frequently smudge up the phone's optics by accident. No good. According to my calculations, there's exactly one thing that the back buttons help with: It's easier to take a screenshot because the power and volume-down buttons are right next to one another.

But again, you'll use the buttons far less frequently than you think. If the phone isn't completely powered off, you don’t have to touch the back button to turn it on. A double-tap of the dark screen wakes the phone up (LG calls the feature KnockOn), but you need to tap near the center of the screen for it to work. Expect about a 70 percent success rate. A double-tap of the screen also puts the phone in standby mode, but you'll need to avoid all the icons, which is tricky. In standby mode, a long-press of the volume-down button quickly launches the camera. A long-press of the volume-up button quickly launches its notes app. Those quick-launch options should be configurable, but if they are, I couldn't figure out how to do it.

The G2's screen is big enough to support desktop-like multitasking, and its CPU is strong enough to handle the load, so there are a few options in the mix for having multiple apps and windows open at the same time. Unfortunately, they don't work as well as they should.

QSlide is the best of these productivity add-ons, letting you display content from other apps in an adjustable-opacity window on top of the application you're working in. It's a Windows-like window that's handy for referencing web pages or documents as you’re typing an email. But it's only available for certain apps. Clip Tray is another good idea hampered by poor implementation. It lets you view and scroll through a big gallery of images when you're adding an attachment without leaving the email app. For some strange reason, it doesn't let you browse your main photo gallery. Instead, you'll need to copy images to your "Clip Tray gallery" for it to work.

If you are the one person in the world who enjoys pop-up messages, the G2 is your dream phone. The first few days you use the G2, you will be greeted at every turn by pop-up tips that tell you how to do basic things like rearrange apps, surf the web, and add contacts. Occasionally, you'll get helpful advice about how to use the phone's unique features, but those tips are best left to the tutorials that launch when you actually use these features.

The G2's biggest flaw isn't its back-facing button array, its better-in-theory add-ons, or its annoying pop-ups. It's the simple fact that the space bar on the phone's default keyboard is too damn close to its home button when you're typing in portrait mode. Instead of putting a space between words, something that has occurred 17 times in this sentence so far, the phone jumps to its home screen. It's not an issue in landscape mode, but the first thing you'll want to do is replace the default LG keyboard with Google Keyboard, SwiftKey, or Swype.

When you tally it all up, the LG G2 does enough things extremely well that its drawbacks seem, if not trivial, then at least manageable. Yes, it's annoying that most of those drawbacks are self-imposed and completely avoidable. But it's kind of like a perfectly cooked steak with a big dollop of hummus plopped on top of it, served with a spoon. The hummus and the spoon don't ruin the meal, but they do make you want to taste the steak without them.