LG G Pro 2: It’s all about the screen

Will we ever see a smartphone that consists of 90 percent screen on the front? There have been rumors of “bezel-less” smartphones for years, but none have appeared yet. The closest phone to it is Japanese; Sharp’s latest Aquos phone has a device that consists of 80 percent screen.

Of the manufacturers known here, LG is most concerned with reducing the bezels. The G2 consists of 75 percent screen. Other manufacturers fall short in this area; the Galaxy S5 has larger bezels than the S4, Sony and Huawei seem to be paying more attention to making their devices flatter, and Apple and Nokia don’t seem to care about the bezels at all.

Yet it is an important element for some; after all, a smartphone revolves around the screen, which is the only way of input, except for a few buttons with a single function. If you want to put the screen in the center, you should make an effort to make the border around it as small as possible. So we were hoping LG would take advantage of its G Pro 2 to show how small it can make the bezels, but that hasn’t happened. 74.2 percent of the front of the G Pro 2 is screen, the same as on its main competitor, Samsung’s Galaxy Note 3.

Despite this, the G Pro 2 is an impressive smartphone when you first pick it up. Because LG has managed to boost the brightness of the panel considerably and the contrast seems okay, it is a nice screen. The resolution of 1920×1080 pixels is also more than sufficient to not see pixels at a normal operating distance. The diagonal of the screen is 5.9″.

The G Pro 2 mainly benefits from its large screen, because otherwise there seem to be no features that are ‘exclusive’ for this device. The phone has the same buttons on the back and there are new software features, but it is obvious that LG will also bring them to the G2 and the first G Pro.

The back of the phone is made of plastic and has a nice rough pattern. The phone therefore feels good and will not easily slide off the couch. That’s an advantage over the previous G Pro.

The G Pro 2 runs on a Snapdragon 800, with four Krait processor cores at 2.3GHz and an Adreno 330 GPU, assisted by 3GB of RAM. That is noticeable; the G Pro 2 feels fast, although LG also seems to have sped up the screen animations to keep up the pace.

The software also has some innovations. The G Pro 2 runs Android 4.4.2 with LG’s own skin and with its own applications for Android. Some features that are also on the G2 mini, such as Knock Code, which allows you to unlock the phone by entering a code when the screen is off, can also be found on the G Pro 2.

LG also puts a lot of emphasis on the camera. It’s a 13-megapixel camera with optical image stabilization and the ability to record video in 4k. The point eludes us, if only because those videos can only be seen in full resolution on few screens and they take up an insane amount of space on your internal memory or memory card. LG has also added the Magic Focus feature, a proprietary interpretation of Nokia’s Refocus. The phone then takes several photos in succession, each with its own focus points. This allows the user to adjust afterwards which part should be in focus. One of the options is also to bring everything into focus.

LG has improved the function of temporarily turning the large screen into a smaller screen. This feature makes it easier to operate the device with one hand. It works with a swipe across the toolbar and can be useful if you need to look something up and you only have one hand available. Thanks to the swipe, the feature can always be activated, but it is something you just need to know.