At roughly the same time that Samsung unveiled their flagship phones for 2016, being the S7 and S7 Edge, LG revealed their flagship smartphone for the year too being the LG G5. With previous iterations of the LG ‘G’ range from the past, they have always been ‘good’ phones – not amazing enough to kill off Samsung or Apple but good enough to buy and be content with. Has LG stepped up their game with the G5? Let’s explore the new features of the phone and weigh up the pros and cons of this rather innovative smartphone.

Before we get into the pros and cons, we need to know what the G5 has it terms of specs. Here they all are:

• G5 weighs 159 grams and measures in at 4 x 73.9 x 7.7 mm.
• The processor used is the Snapdragon 820 chip with Adreno 530 graphics.
• 32gb of storage, 4gb of RAM and a micro-SD card slot expanding storage to a potential 200gb.
• The screen has a resolution of 1440 x 2560 pixels with a pixel density of 554 ppi.
• The phone features the latest Android software: Marshmallow 6.
• It has a fingerprint sensor and USB Type-C.
• The battery is a removable and 2800mAh in size.

Pretty exciting? Well, we have not moved onto the main pro of this phone….

Main Pro – Modular in Design

What differentiates the G5 from competitors is that is that you can change the hardware to fit your needs (similar to Project Ara by Google). If you want a better camera, you can use a camera module. If you want more battery, there’s a module for that too. What makes the G5 promising is that the module platform is open source, so hopefully many 3rd parties will make great modules for the G5 – this could be the start of something amazing.

Main Con – Smaller Battery

Battery life is becoming a real concern for consumers with smartphones. For example, the Samsung Galaxy S7 is slightly thicker than the S6 to accommodate a larger battery – this was because the battery life of the S6 was appallingly short.

With the G5, the battery is actually smaller than its predecessor the G4 by 200mAh. In terms of how this will affect the battery life of the phone will vary since the 820 processor will be more energy efficient along with many other components of the phone – only tests will tell us the true extent of the LG G5’s battery life.

Ultimately, this is an exciting phone by LG who have innovated to create a modular-in-design smartphone. This can really work to their favor if many 3rd parties decide to design their own modules. However, considering the size of LG in the smartphone market, there is a chance 3rd parties may not be won over with spending time and money on designing modules. Therefore, is it worth buying? I would say so if the module design picks up with 3rd parties.