The first major keynote at MWC 2016 has just ended and with
it came the announcement of the first major flagship for this year – the LG G5.
For this year, LG has jumped aboard the flagship bandwagon
and employed metal in the construction of the G5. However, in contrast to other
flagship models from other manufacturers, the design of the G5 doesn’t use
chamfering. Instead, LG has opted for what it’s calling a “fluid metal” body
with a beveled glass on the front.
The phone is built around a 5.3-inch LCD panel with the same
resolution as the LG G4. The display is always on, which LG achieves through a
dedicated memory and a power-management chip so the main chip can go to sleep
even though the display is on all the time.
The innards of the G5 is composed of a Snapdragon 820
chipset with 4GB of RAM and 32GB of storage with option of expandability
through a microSD card.
Just like the LG
V10, the G5 features a dual-camera setup but this time, LG has implemented
it at the back. There’s a 16MP+8MP camera combo at the back which allows the
handset to have up to 135 degrees Field of View (FoV). The phone also comes
with a USB Type-C port and a fingerprint scanner at the back.
As with the G4, LG’s flagship model for 2016 also comes with
a removable 2800mAh battery. The Korean company has managed to keep this
feature despite the all-metal body by having a removable bottom part.
On top of that, LG has upped the ante by making this
removable part accessible to other accessories. These add-ons which the Korean
tech giant calls as “friends” snap on place as modules much like how Google
imagined its Project
Ara phone.
At MWC, LG introduced two add-ons for the G5 – a camera grip
and a Bang & Olufsen DAC.
The camera grip called the LG Cam Plus adds an 1100mAh
battery to the G5 and features hardware controls for the phone’s camera. These
include a hardware shutter key, a video button and a zoom dial. On the other
hand, the B&O DAC transforms the G5 into a Hi-Fi smartphone.
LG promises that it will open the standard to third-party
manufacturers so they can create even more add-ons.
