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LG G4 Stylus review – Let’s get down to business

We’ve seen two LG smartphones wearing the G4 badge this year, and now there’s a third: a much bigger phone, but one with lower specifications.

Meet the LG G4 Stylus.

The idea of LG releasing a smartphone that seemed to offer nothing more than a stylus as an addition struck us as a bit odd, but that changed when we started using the phone. As it turns out, the LG G4 Stylus is a decent phone, but its true power is found in its simple but effective multitasking and extraordinary battery life.

LG G4 Stylus review: Appearance

The Stylus boasts a 5.7inch HD display, and the whole phone is just a bit bigger than its siblings, though also thinner than the flagship G4.

As with previous LG smartphones, the Stylus’ unlock key and differently-textured volume rocker are located at the rear of the phone,. just below the 8MP camera. And very much unlike the G4 and the G4 Beat, the G4 Stylus doesn’t feature a curved design.

A thing of beauty that won't look out of place on your desk.
A thing of beauty that won’t look out of place on your desk.

A micro USB charging port is located at the bottom while the 3.5mm audio jack is located at the top left; the stylus is located on the left side, within the body of the phone. The pleasantly-sized stylus sits very securely in its slot, too, so it won’t just fall out and get lost.

LG G4 Stylus review: Performance and Specifications

Inside the G4 Stylus we find a Qualcomm Snapdragon 410 CPU that has a clock speed of between 200 and 1200MHz. We thought this would allow great adaptability of the CPU to scale down during idle and conserve battery, but even when running at idle the Stylus flits between 900 and 1200MHz; fortunately the battery is a massive 3000 Li-ion so it doesn’t suffer too badly.

PC Mark revealed where the G4 Stylus was strongest; word processing and web browsing. While the average user may not find this all that appealing, a person constantly on the move and still needing to be able to edit documents and send emails will.

antutu-pcmark-scores
Antutu and PC Mark Work benchmarks. Click to enlarge.

An Adreno 306 GPU and 1GB of RAM make the dual window mode not only look good, but is also extremely usable.

The storage capacity is a relatively small 8GB, and there is support for a microSD card up to 128GB in size. No surprise that this capacity irks us, but in fairness if you’re a professional on the move you are more likely to use a cloud service of some form to access everything you may need, so it’s a moot point.

LG G4 Stylus review: Display

The screen is not Full HD and the 720 x 1 280p IPS display only has a pixel density of 258ppi. For some reason this is only apparent when displaying text, which appears slightly pixelated. Video and images don’t suffer, though, and the contrast is beautiful.

Responsiveness is great with up to 10-point multi touch support. This means you’re going to have to be typing pretty fast to get the keyboard to lag out and that the stylus is extremely responsive. Typing is very well executed compared to other phones we’ve used recently.

This is a small detail but once again, for the person who needs to make changes to documents on the go, the G4 Stylus is really a joy to use.

The proprietary stylus is comfortable to use.
The proprietary stylus is comfortable to use.

LG G4 Stylus review: Camera

The rear camera and 5MP selfie camera are nothing special. Low light conditions result in grainy photos; an HDR function for the rear camera and beauty filter for the selfie camera do remedy this slightly but we have seen better in recent days; for instance the G4 Beat’s is better, and we weren’t exactly wild about it.

The camera is not wonderful, but fortunately the appeal of this phone lies elsewhere.

LG G4 Stylus review: Battery

With heavy usage, we managed to get three full days of use out of the 3000mAh li-ion battery, which we could have pushed to three and a half days quite comfortably. During this time the G4 Stylus was used as a primary smartphone making calls, responding to emails and surfing the web with the brightness of the screen set to full.

LG G4 Stylus: Conclusion

Looking beyond the rather stingy storage, its pixelated text and the poor cameras, we are nonetheless impressed with the G4 Stylus. This phone makes no bones about the fact that it is a business machine and it brings mobile office functionality in spades.

The pricing is great for what you get, and if you’re a professional on the move who needs to work at any time, anywhere, you should definitely consider the LG G4 Stylus as your next smartphone.

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Details

Price: R3 999
Display: 5.7 inch 720 x 1 280p, 258ppi
Operating System: Android 5.0.1 (Lollipop)
System Chip: Qualcomm 
CPU: Snapdragon 410 @ 1.2GHz
RAM: 1GB
Storage: 8GB
Front camera: 5.0 MP
Back camera 8.0 MP laser auto-focus
Battery: 3 000mAh Li-ion Battery

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