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Here's a trend in Android smartphone releases:
1) A manufacturer releases a new flagship model with a great specs and a high price to match.
2) A month or two later that manufacturer releases a mid-price, midrange phone with a larger but lower resolution display that has design echoes of the flagship.
And thus the LG G Stylo is born, but happily with a twist: it adds a stylus for jotting notes, sketching and scratching that hard to reach itch on your back. The pen has a tiny rubbery tip like a capacitive stylus, but it doesn't work on other capacitive screens, so it's not a traditional capacitive stylus and it adds a nice perk: palm rejection (you can rest your hand on the screen while you write). It's not as fancy as the Samsung Galaxy Note's Wacom S Pen, but it gets the job done. The stylus is amply sized and it lives in a silo at the top of the phone. LG tried their hand at a few pen-enabled phablets (super-sized phones) a few years back, but the G Stylo is a more mainstream size and shape. It's just a hair bigger than the LG G4, which is impressive considering that the G4 is one of the most compact 5.5" phones. The Stylo has a 5.7" IPS 720 x 1280 display and a tapered and curved back with rear buttons like the G4. It's a nice looking phone with a faux metal plastic back that I personally find more appealing than the G4's fake metal back, and the front is dominated by the display for a clean and modern look. That back is removable and grants access to the user swappable 3,000 mAh battery, microSD card slot and SIM card slot.
The LG G Stylo is available on Sprint (we use that model for this review), Boost Mobile, T-Mobile and MetroPCS. The specs are a bit different between the Sprint/Boost model and T-Mobile/MetroPCS models. All four models run on the 1.2 GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 410 quad core CPU, have 4G LTE, a front 5MP camera that can shoot 1080p video, dual band WiFi 802.11n, Bluetooth 4.0 and GPS. The Sprint/Boost version has slightly lower specs for RAM, storage and rear camera (1 gig RAM, 8 gigs internal storage and an 8MP rear camera). The T-Mobile/MetroPCS version has 2 gigs of RAM, 16 gigs of storage and a 13MP rear camera, which is quite nice given the low full retail price of $249 ($288 on Sprint). All models have laser auto-focus for the rear camera.
Display
Though 1280 x 720 might not sound very good for a phone display when high end models have QHD 2560 x 1440 or 1920 x 1080 resolutions, the 258 PPI Stylo display is fairly bright, has good contrast and pleasing colors. Those colors don't pop as they do on the LG G4 or the Super AMOLED Samsung Galaxy S6, and viewing angles are a little weak for an IPS display, but I can't imagine anyone looking at the LG G Stylo's display and saying "yuck". It's pleasing, especially for the price.
Performance and Horsepower
The 1.2 GHz Snapdragon CPU with Adreno 306 graphics is powerful enough to allow Android 5.0 Lollipop with LG's UI to run smoothly. Our Sprint version's 1 gig of RAM puts a cap on powerhouse multitasking, unlike the T-Mobile model with 2 gigs of RAM. In everyday use, we didn't encounter undue lag, and the phone really didn't feel meaningfully slower than the much faster LG G4 when navigating the OS, loading web pages or using Twitter and Evernote. Today's most graphically intensive 3D games do have slower frame rates, and though they're playable, games that require high frame rates for best gameplay like first person shooters are a bit harder to play well.
Benchmarks
| |
Quadrant |
3DMark Ice Storm Unlimited |
AnTuTu |
Sunspider JavaScript Test (lower is better) |
| LG G Stylo |
14,559 |
unsupported phone |
21,542 |
1545(Chrome)/ 1031 (webkit) |
| Asus ZenFone 2, 1.8 GHz |
18,410 |
16,300 |
41,594 |
692 |
| Alcatel Idol 3 |
22,198 |
7775 |
31,006 |
1188 |
| OnePlus One |
23,958 |
18,370 |
37,235 |
1135 |
| Moto E 2nd gen |
13,741 |
4481 |
22,057 |
1296 |
| LG G4 |
23,730 |
18,655 |
46,043 |
760 |
| HTC One M9 |
22,323 |
16,658 |
36,309 |
831 |
| Samsung Galaxy S6 |
33,355 |
21,160 |
61,873 |
420 (webkit)/1025 (Chrome) |
| Nexus 6 |
13,595 |
23,520 |
49,961 |
795 |
| Samsung Galaxy S5 |
23,643 |
18,329 |
35,357 |
398 |
| Moto X (2nd gen) |
22,170 |
19,924 |
44,340 |
776 |
| HTC One M8 |
24,527 |
20,896 |
36,087 |
776 |
| Nexus 5 |
8808 |
17,828 |
27,017 |
718 |
Geekbench 3: 459/1413
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