Top critical review
3.0 out of 5 starsSo quick and lightweight but...
Reviewed in the United States on October 1, 2017
this phone definitely has a lot of pros in my opinion. One of which being the insane bang for your buck! The screen is beautiful, the responsiveness is snappy, the load times are super quick but....
What made me send it back to amazon? (Thanks again amazon for accepting these returns for products, it's a big reason why I buy from you guys). It is missing many KEY features that are imperative for me to have on a phone. For instance, no group texting!! You can sending one message to multiple people but it all comes back individually. Now, I know ylwhat you are thinking.. surely I just missed something right? I and all my friends tried everything we could and I think I visited every forum.. nothing.. except that lg states it's a feature you can turn off/on in he message settings. It definitely wasn't there. This was the deal breaker for me. I text multiple groups of people needing times and dates. A lot of the time I have individuals that are part of multiple groups as well. After that I decided I wanted to change my theme. So I got on lg smart world or whatever it's called. It needed my "country of origin". On he list there was no America or USA in there. Just a small list of random countries. Turns out you need to research your individual phone and figure out specifically where your phone is from and match the "country of origin" to that. Then you generally only get themes that are popular is that area. Hope you guys like Thia backgrounds! Also, I have found out, if you just pick a random "country of origin" it will only say "not available in your country" and the only way to reset your country is a full factory wipe of the phone! After this I putted around the phone looking for any familiar features that I'm used too. Nothing really. And anytime I wanted to find something else specific it required a great deal of googling before I could figure out how to possible do what I wanted. I also had a very hard time getting all my contacts from google+ to this device. I'm not sure if that's googles issue or this phones software.
In conclusion, this is a very fast and zippy phone for the money. The features of the phone are what Killed it for me. I don't want homework to do for a convenience item I've bought. I can understand having to look some stuff up to do very specific alterations, but this was ridiculous.
Edit:
I decided that I may of been judging this phone a little too quick. Amazon, thankfully, has a 30-day return policy on almost or possibly everything they sell. So, I figured I would give it a shot. Let me break this down so it's not to terribly long.
Pros:
1. The phone feels very sturdy.
2. The second screen is an amazing idea that I truly found I love. it's so nice to be able to ready text messages or switch up a song or open frequently used apps without barely having to touch the phone.
3. Such a snappy fast phone! It will open apps so very fast.
Cons:
1. Battery life.. To be fair I am not too familiar the average modern phones battery life, but compared to my iphone 6 plus it's not even in the same league. What I would consider "light use" I would easily have to change my phone twice a day. Anything more than that and I might as well bring my charger with me everywhere I go. I see why the battery is replaceable.
2. LG apps. the messaging application is subpar on many aspects. Not many customizable options and not good to use.
3. The keyboard. I don't know how to explain this properly. It's it just sluggish and way way way way to easy to button mash. The auto correct is just terrible as well. I set mine to "aggressive" autocorrect and it still was subpar.
4. Resolution. I was told this was a 4k screen. All I'm going to say is a s8 is 4k as well. but that's like comparing apples to 4k apples. the s8 screen is breath-taking compared to this. It wasn't terrible but it wasn't much better than my Iphone 6 plus, maybe even worse in some aspects.
5. The LG "smart world" I think what it was called. Is just horrible. I couldn't download a "theme" or many other things for this phone due to the phone being made for a specific country (I live in the USA). In order to be able to download themes and many other things on this phone I was required to backtrack my phones serial number and try to figure out what my phones country of origin was, then do a factory reset on my phone to be able to pick a new country, then select hopefully the correct one. you have to do a factory reset because once you select a country you can not change it, and if you choose wrong you only get the dialog "Not available in your country".
6. Lastly, no LTE!!!!!! most of the time my phone would only show an "H" or 3g connection. I thought that there was a moderate chance my SIM card was damaged during the transfer, so I put it back in my Iphone. Nope, LTE all day with my Iphone, and only 3g to sometimes 4g (no LTE) with the LG. and yes both were GSM phones that accepted nano SIM cards. They should of worked perfectly together.
All in all this phone was returned to amazon and thankfully to them I received a full refund. I wanted this phone to work so badly because I think it's wrong we pay so much for modern phones. but alas, you get what you pay for. I really did want this phone to work but not being able to stream music/pod cast while I drive was the final nail in the return box coffin.
