Mobile World Congress always holds some of the greatest breakthroughs in technology, similar to its bigger brother CES (Consumer Electrionics Show), but unlike CES, it tends to focus more on, well, the mobile side of things, namely smartphones, but also virtual reality as of late. This year, at MWC 2016, there was technology from many companies, with Alcatel, HTC, Huawei, LG and Samsung, being the largest stars. But in all reality, LG and Samsung seemed to captivate the largest presence of all of them, and they seemed to be directly taking shots at each other.
Samsung took to the stage with the Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge, both with similar looks to their fathers before them. However, Samsung didn't just release the same phone. In both phones, they expanded the battery capacity to lengthen battery life, improved the cameras to allow for faster focusing and better low-light performance than the iPhone, adding a micro-SD card slot for up to 200GB of expansion, and added waterproofing to the mix, something many people felt nostalgic for when leaving the Galaxy S5. There were other minor changes, such as making the camera bump on the back even smaller, and only creating a 32GB capacity due to the micro-SD card slot (reduces cost), both certainly welcome changes, but overall, there were just the big four.
LG, on the other hand, went all-out with their LG G5. Take Apple's slogan of "the only thing that has changed is everything," and apply it to the G5, and the slogan will actually make sense (yeah, just stop the propaganda BS, Apple. Please.). Because everything has changed by the G5, if you haven't figured that out by now. The whole body has been redesigned. The internals have all been redesigned. The cameras have been redesigned completely. There wasn't a single part of this phone that was left untouched.
Lets start with the cameras. There are three of them. A new high resolution 8MP on the front is cool, but on the back is where the magic happens. There, two cameras can be seen; an 8MP wide-angle lens, and a 16MP 4:3 lens for normal photos. The beauty of it is, that the phone can take both high-resolution photos, as well as wide photos, all in one snap, while phones such as the iPhone or almost any other phone require you to downsize the resolution to get a wider aspect ratio.
The LG G5 also moved its volume buttons to the front, while switching out its power button on the back for a circular fingerprint sensor similar to that on Huawei's Nexus 6P. Speaking of which, it also followed in the direction of the Nexus 6P with its solid metal construction, a surprise to many that has seen all of LG's previous G flagships. While many thought this would do away with removable batteries and SD cards, they were quickly surprised. To their shock, the bottom of the phone is removable, allowing the battery to be quickly swapped out, but also other additional modules to be added, such as a camera module with an extended battery, or a high-fidelity audio speaker DAC, improving speaker and headphone quality. The SIM slot on the phone has also been lengthened to allow for an SD card to be inserted alongside the nano-SIM card. So if anything, other than the loss of custom back plates (thinking of you, sexy, sleek wood), LG added on to their already expandable phones, to make them one of the first truly modular phones.
So while Samsung spent the time to review user criticism to refine its already great product, LG took leaps and bounds and released a completely revised product. While both phones look awesome, and personally, I would choose the LG G5, I also think that, given a year, LG will revise their current modular offerings and mechanism for their LG G6. So if you can wait a year, go for a later phone, because they will certainly be refined, as the mobile market typically does. However, right now, I think both phones are phenomenal, and you can't go wrong with either one in 2016.
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