LG G Flex 2 – Battery Life

As we’ve mentioned, the G Flex 2’s battery is curvy and non-removable, just like its predecessor’s. The drop down in body size means there’s now room to fit a 3000mAh battery instead of a 3500mAh one. That’s the same size as you’ll find inside the LG G3, and you get the same battery saver mode, which can be set continuously or when you hit 15% battery life.

The original G Flex delivered two days’ use and the G Flex 2 managed the same. On full charge from 9am, the G Flex 2 generally made it to around 5.30pm the following day, so you can get two working days out of it.

In more intense testing using the Geekbench 3 battery test, the G Flex 2 scored a pretty decent 11-12 hours. It was a similar story when we ran a 720p HD video on loop with the brightness at 50%. That puts it in the same bracket as the iPhone 6 and betters the G3, which does have to contend with the fact that it packs a power-sapping 2K QHD display compared to the G Flex 2’s Full HD OLED screen.

If you have a habit of forgetting to charge your phone overnight, the G Flex 2, like the Note 4, uses Qualcomm’s Quick Charge 2.0 technology. This lets you get from 0% to 50% battery in less than 40 minutes. It fully lives up to that claim as well, getting you to full charge in just over an hour. Couple that with the G Flex 2’s battery-retention qualities in standby and it’s a good all-round performance.

LG G Flex 2 – Call and Sound Quality

We can’t say we really had much trouble making calls with the iPhone 6 or the Galaxy S5, but we’re all for improvements, despite the decreasing amount of time we actually spend making calls these days. The G Flex 2’s curve apparently has one more big benefit, and that’s getting the microphone and speaker up closer to your ear and mouth in a bid to improve call clarity. In reality, it’s not something we really noticed. Call quality is perfectly fine with no signs of dropout. LG includes a secondary microphone for noise cancellation to combat exterior noise, but we remain unconvinced about its benefit.

There’s a solitary speaker on the rear that’s positioned in exactly the same place as it is on the LG G3 and it offers a similarly decent but not groundbreaking performance. There’s a little warmth and you can get good levels of loudness without any real distortion. Hiding it around the back certainly helps keep the design clean, but it means you have more chance of covering it with your hand than you with a pair of front-facing ones like the HTC One M8 or the upcoming HTC One M9.

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Other things to consider

LG has the usual connectivity bases well covered for Wi-Fi (a/b/g/n/ac), and thanks to Snapdragon’s new processor the G Flex 2 supports the Cat 6 LTE standard up from the Cat 4 modem packed into the G Flex. What that means is that if you’re in an LTE 4G-friendly territory, it can support theoretical download speeds of up to 300Mbps, depending on signal strength.

Should I buy the LG G Flex 2?

If you really want a curved smartphone, then this is the best there is. That’s not really saying much, though. This is the phone that the first G Flex should have been, and we praise LG for trying to do something different with the design, just like Samsung did with the quirky Galaxy Note Edge.

The problem is that we can’t see the benefit of the curve, no matter how LG tries to sell it to us. Couple that with some performance and overheating issues that need to be ironed out once the post-production models are available, and there’s no truly compelling reason to go for this when there are flagship phones from HTC, Samsung and LG around the corner.

LG hasn’t slapped a SIM-free price on the G Flex 2, but we do know it costs £34.50 a month on a two-year contract, which does put it into iPhone 6 realms. If you asked us if we’d go for the Flex 2 over an iPhone 6, we’d comfortably say no.

Verdict

The G Flex 2 is a refreshing approach to smartphone design, but it doesn’t mask a phone that’s behind the smartphone curve. LG also needs to address those performance and overheating issues, pronto.

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