Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

This phone is great for the price. Some features of it feel high-end while the skimping is on par for its price range. It is relatively fast and has amazing battery life, especially when you switch KitKat to its ART runtime from Dalvik (To do this, you have to enable the Developers Options menu. Find out more by searching for online articles about 'Enable ART on KitKat'). You can literally go 2-3 days without charging the battery with light usage or get through a day with heavy usage. It also recharges relatively fast considering its battery capacity (3000 mwh). While I experienced some stuttering on the menus and when switching between apps with Dalvik, after I switched to ART, almost everything became buttery smooth. I haven't gotten very many 'forced closes' or random restarts compared to past phones. The UI itself has been pretty reliable since I enabled ART, running as expected. PROS Price range KitKat Battery Life (Amazing) Knock Code feature is pretty cool (when it works, see below) QuickMemo is neat, easily make screenshots and edit it with notes using pen marks. However, I wish there was a way to type text into the screenshot as writing with my finger rarely comes out looking good. Typing text would also make it easy to make memes straight off the phone. Maybe they could add this feature in an update (LG, you listening)? Quad-core (not the fastest, but fast enough for most apps and games. I haven't encountered an app with speed issues. Wi-fi connects very quickly Miracast actually works! QSlide is an interesting feature, though I haven't used it much. You can keep certain apps open while accessing the UI, kinda like a window on a computer. Might be helpful for some multi-tasking. Rear camera is better than cameras on past phones, though with some issues (see below). HDR camera feature actually makes a difference, though it drains the battery when using it. Other neat camera features. Has NFC, but I haven't used it Big screen. Not S5 big, but kinda like a mid-sized SUV in a sea of Corollas. Call quality has been very good, though it seems to take longer to get through into the call. The voice on the other line sounds great though. Is 4g LTE Spark-enabled, though connections have been inconsistent etc. etc. etc. CONS, bugs, and issues (keep in mind I'm a very critical person) 1GB of RAM is just enough, though I'd like more Screen resolution is low for the screen size, though the screen still looks good. Hardly pixelated from your average viewing distance. No auto-brightness Fakes us out with the bottom speakers. There is actually only ONE speaker. WHY tease us, LG? Front camera is blah. Recording video on the rear camera has some focusing issues. I would frequently find it going out of focus while recording video. This seems to happen mostly in low-light areas with moving objects, like the camera gets confused as to what to focus on. I would often have to move the camera around to fix the issue, but then it ruins the video. Tapping the screen while video-recording does not re-focus like when taking pictures. I don't know why they didn't leave it in video-recording mode. Photo mode also has some auto-focus issues as well, especially with close-up objects. However, at least you can tap the screen to re-focus. Knock feature is unreliable sometimes, especially in hot and humid conditions. It also doesn't seem to work well under direct sunlight. Of course, you can just hold down the HOME button or Power button to turn the screen on, but it is annoying when you are in a hurry and the Knock feature isn't working. Phone gets affected by heavy vibrations, i.e. amplified bass at an EDM festival. It will run slower. I don't know the science behind it, but I found out from personal experience. Problems with proximity sensor when you are calling a phone number that requires you to dial numbers in a menu (i.e. press 1 for customer service). When you take the phone from your ear, the screen may not come on or the screen will be unresponsive. This must be a bug. 4G will go from 25-30 mbps to under 1 mbps, depending on where you are. For example, 4g barely works inside my apartment. Luckily I have wi-fi but still, I thought LTE was supposed to penetrate through walls? I have also had issues where the phone won't switch back to 4g from 3g unless I update the PRL. If you find yourself stuck on 3g in an area where you normally get 4g, update the PRL. Data and calls will not work underground, i.e. in a subway station. Granted, I haven't had a phone or service that has worked underground. Editing photos on the camera is unable to save for some reason in Gallery, rendering its cool photo editing features useless. This must be a bug. Given it's price range and its reliability and features (bugs and issues aside), I would still give it 5 stars. Okay, maybe 4.5 stars. Or 4.25 stars. Whatever. Hopefully LG will come around to fixing some of these bugs in an update. If anyone has found a solution to any of the bugs/issues mentioned, let me know. I will update the review when necessary. BUY IT! ENJOY IT! Or not, I don't care. I don't work for LG. UPDATE (08/13/2014) Deleted listing 'night brightness' feature not working as a bug. It spontaneously starting working. I'm not sure what I did to cause it to start working, but I have been turning things on and off and installing and reinstalling things to fix a battery drain issue related to Google Play Services, so a number of things could have caused it. UPDATE (10/13/2014) The battery drain issue still exists and it does seem to be related to Google Play Services. Don't know any permanent remedy except to reboot the phone whenever it starts happening. It only happens periodically, especially overnight. I'm also starting to run out of phone storage space because ART makes the apps use up more space. There has been one system update and it didn't change the UI or fix anything I noticed. Otherwise, after owning it for four months, it's been solid. A bit of lag here and there, but it's been stable and haven't come across many random reboots. The price has dropped considerably since I bought the phone so I highly recommend it. UPDATE (01/20/2015) So I've actually knocked one star off its rating because I've been running into more problems lately with the phone. I've owned it for around 6 months now. I'm coming across more random freeze-ups and battery drain incidents that I have yet to resolve. Basically the battery will sometimes drain at the rate of 30% an hour for some reason. Sometimes a reboot fixes it, sometimes not. When it happens, it can be a huge inconvenience, especially when the battery is not full and you were expecting its normal performance. Generally, the battery still lasts a long time when it isn't suffering from 'sudden battery drain syndrome'. Otherwise, the phone will freeze sometimes when you turn the screen back on and after a minute, the phone will reboot on its own. I've also had the phone randomly shut off even with battery life. However, these problems do not occur with as much frequency as some 'bad' phones I've had. Overall, the phone still has outstanding battery life. I still haven't done a factory reset yet and continue to run it in the buggier ART runtime. I bet doing or changing one or the other would alleviate some of the problems I'm coming across.