LG V10 Review

2015 was a pretty interesting year for smartphones. All the major players (with the exception of HTC), enjoyed critical praise from one of their new handsets, with Apple leading the pack once again. One of the silent leaders in the Android category was LG, as they released two of they years absolute best. Their flagship device, the LG G4 maintained the progress set forth by the previous model. The LG V10 was announced shortly afterwards, with the intent of tackling other phablets(God, I hate that phrase) in the market. Packing a ton of internal memory, a great design, and a stellar camera system the V10 was all set to seemingly take over the phablet crown.

If I had to base this review just solely on looks, the review unit I got would be the coolest phone ever. I was lucky enough to snag the white and gold (or is it blue and black) version from Verizon and it was a knockout of a phone. The phone is constructed with silicone and stainless steel and makes the phone feel really good and solid. People describe a sort of premium feel with certain smartphones, and this phone definitely has that. Between the brushed sides and the textured battery door, the LG V10 felt really good and grippy, and unless you’re not a fan of oversized phones, you’ll have no issues hanging on to it. The anchor of this phone is the brilliant 5.7 inch IPS quad-HD display that actually houses a secondary display used for notifications and alerts. The cool thing about the secondary display was a little customizable name tag that gives users the ability to add a little personal flair to their device. The other unique feature of the V10 is the addition of two 5MP front facing cameras for those photo aficionados out there. There’s also a 16MP camera on the back of the phone, and underneath the removable battery door lies an awesome 3,000 mAh battery along with the SIM and SD slot.

On the inside of the device is a perfect processor/chipset combo, that makes the V10 one of the most powerful phones on the market. Powered by a super fast 64-bit 1.8 GHz hexa-core Sanpdragon processor, Adreno 418 GPU, and 4GB of RAM, the V10 will swallow any task you throw at it whole. Streaming videos, playing hi-res games, and every other mundane process you can think of was done on this phone and it was done with no lag or stutter. Battery life was also above average on the V10, as I was able to squeeze out an entire day and almost into the next day with a single charge. Storage was also a non issue on this phone as it comes with 64GB of internal storage along with a microSD slot that’s expandable up to 2TB.

The UI on the V10 is the most painful part of an otherwise awesome experience. I use a Nexus 6P daily and there is nothing like using stock Android on a powerful phone. The LG software, while still an upgraded experience from previous years, still has a long way to go. The icons and fonts are overly large and cartoony, and most of the additional LG apps don’t really do much to extend the overall usability of the device. Thankfully, the V10 being an Android device you can download something like the Google Now Launcher or Nova Launcher to give you a close-to-stock experience.

The cameras on the V10 are yet another pair from a ton of triumphant cameras on Android devices. In fact, I’d say in 2015, Android had it’s most ambitious year ever in terms of camera quality and usability. That said, the V10 definitely rocks the best camera system on any Android device to date. The double front facing cameras are there to provide a unique selfie experience as there’s one for up close, tight shots and a second front camera for wider group selfies. The main camera is a 16MP powerhouse that essentially took great shots regardless of what type of lighting conditions I happened upon. I loved the fact that LG decided to drop the manual control options into the video camera as well as for taking stills. Being able to adjust things like ISO and white balance helped increase the quality of an already exceptional video experience. So many phones suffer from “shaky cam syndrome” and it leads to some really undesirable motion blur during recording. Thankfully, the image stabilization on the V10 almost completely eradicated this. Here’s a few shots from the camera.

The LG V10 was a good phone. Like surprisingly good. All the way from the cameras to the processors, this phone hangs right up there with the top smartphones available, and not just the ones in the Android crowd. It’s definitely a larger phone, and it’s a little on the heavy side, but genuinely outside of the awful user interface, this phone is great. While the phone also happens to be a bit pricey, it’s still one of the best Android devices to be released in the last year.