Verdict

Pros

• Good battery life
• Half-decent camera
• Funky LED notification light

Cons

• No Auto Brightness setting
• Low-end processor
• Some lag

What is the LG L7 2?

The LG L7 2 is a lower mid-range phone. It’ll cost you a little around £170 SIM-free, but until that drops a bit we imagine most prospective buyers will be looking to buy one on a cheapy contract. It may not set any hearts racing, and it lacks the aggressive pricing of some rivals, but offers a solid baseline Android experience

LG L7 2 – Design

The LG L7 2 is a plastic-bodied phone. That’s all you’re going to get at this price unless you buy an old mobile.

It tries to trick the eye into thinking its back is brushed aluminium with a metallic finish, but get your fingers on the thing and there’s no mistaking it for anything but plastic. That the curved sides give up on trying to look like metal doesn’t help the LG L7 2’s case, either.

However, it is a nice change from glossy black plastic.

There is one other hardware element that tries to separate the LG L7 2 from the pack visually – around the central home button is an LED indicator that flashes different colours depending on the type of notification it wants to bleat about.

In truth it’d look classier up above the screen, but imagine kids would love it.

However, it’s probably a bit chunky if you’re looking for a phone for a younger child (not to mention a bit expensive). At 9.7mm thick and 67mm wide, the LG L7 2 is fairly large for a 4.3-inch phone – chunkier than the original LG Optimus L7 too. It doesn’t feel much smaller than a Google Nexus 4, which has a significantly larger screen.

Slightly chunkier bodies and screen bezels are a thing you generally have to learn to live with when shopping for a lower-mid-range phone like this.

Low internal storage is another classic cut-price measure. The LG L7 2 has 4GB of internal memory, leaving you with just over 1.5GB to play with. If you want to install many games, or use the phone as a music or video player, you’ll need to buy a memory card. You’ll find a microSD card slot under the battery cover.

Button placement on the phone it pretty standard, and adult-sized hands will find them all easy to reach one-handed. However, there is an extra on-body button. On the left edge next to the volume rocker is a customisable button that can be used to launch any app you like. It’s particularly for firing up something like the music player, Whatsapp or an email client – although the LG L7 2 does have to be unlocked for it to work.

LG L7 2 – Screen Quality

One part of the LG L7 2 that hasn’t suffered from cutbacks is the top screen layer. It has a toughened glass screen layer, making it far more durable and (most important) scratch-resistant than a true low-end phone.

The LG L7 2 uses a 4.3-inch IPS screen of 480 x 800 pixel resolution. Common to most IPS-type screens, viewing angles are great. 

However, the 217 pixels per inch screen quite a bit blockier than a 720p phone. It may be sold out now, but it’s hard to forget that the Nexus 4 was recently on sale for the same price as one of these LG L7 2s. And small text can look a little blocky – plus the pixel structure is a bit too apparent for the phone to have truly strong picture quality.

Colours are vivid and pretty accurate, and top brightness is strong, though. Our main annoyance of the LG L7 2’s screen is that it doesn’t have auto brightness setting (as it misses out on an ambient light sensor) so you have to manually alter brightness when you move between indoors and out.

It’s not too strong outdoors either as its anti-reflective coating is not hugely effective. Having to change brightness manually and dealing with screen reflections are two of the most annoying parts of the LG L7 2.