lg g4 – Near-Earth Object

It is being reported that Apple will begin to use OLED displays in an upcoming iPhone generation, as opposed to the IPS LCDs it has always used. And I’m not at all happy about this.

I’m not an iPhone user at the moment, so in the near-term I don’t really care what Apple does to its phones. But it can’t be denied that anything significant that Apple does with its most important product will likely be aped by most other manufacturers, if they aren’t already doing the same thing.

And the problem is that I seem to have some sort of ocular allergy to OLED. Throughout my Year of Phones, several of the units I tried out had AMOLED or Super AMOLED displays, and I recently spent some time with a Dell Venue 8 7000 tablet, which is OLED. And with only one exception, all of the OLED devices gave me headaches when looking at them for more than a few minutes. Indeed, I feel the strain on my eyes almost immediately.

I have no solid explanation for why this is so. OLED devices with which I’ve had significant experience, Notes 4 and 5 and the Venue 8, while they are truly excellent, each gave me the same problem. I thought perhaps that there might be some difference between Samsung’s proprietary “Super AMOLED” and Dell’s vanilla “OLED,” but no. They both produced the same effect.

And no settings-tweaking helped. Lowering the brightness, lowering the saturation level, adjusting hues, nothing mattered.

Some folks in forums have speculated to me that this has to do with an imperceptible “flicker” that OLED displays produce and LCDs don’t, but that’s just a guess from a few people who are otherwise as stumped by this as I am.

There was one exception, however, the Nexus 6, the device with which I had a stormy relationship. That has a Quad-HD AMOLED display just like the Notes 4 and 5, and yet with all the problems and delights I had with that device, I don’t recall headaches being an issue at all. I have no idea why.

On the flip side are LCD displays, like that on my beloved LG G4, and on every iPhone and iPad ever. I have never had any problem gawking at iDevice screens for hours on end, and my G4 Quad-HD LCD display is so lovely I can sometimes hardly believe it.

Also, I’ve seen far more problems with OLED displays than LCDs. This is anecdotal experience, of course, but on OLED screens I see far more burn-in, ghosting, dark spots, dead pixels, and the like. I do know that it’s currently a fact that they degrade more quickly than LCDs. They seem, from my personal experience, to be far less reliable.

But now Apple will, well, saturate the market with OLED, making it the new normal. OLED displays, at their best, are far more eye-catching and rich than most LCDs (though the G4’s is right up there), so they have obvious appeal. But if they are less reliable, why would Apple commit to them so wholeheartedly?

Boy Genius Reports speculates that Apple is prepared for OLED’s degradation problem, saying, “It stands to reason that Apple is confident that the aforementioned drawbacks can and will be addressed in the years ahead.” But I don’t think that needs to be true at all. Apple has already introduced its own leasing program so that folks can get new a new iPhone model every year, so we know that Apple very much wants to push regular consumers to upgrade at a rate that’s high even for many tech enthusiasts. If they’re confident that an enormous number of their users are going to get rid of their phones after a year anyway, why should they care if the OLED displays start to lose their “oomph”? You’re buying the new one anyway.

But what this all means for me (which is what this is really about, remember) is that the best phones on the market in the coming years will all be OLED in one way or another, which means that, unless they change something as-yet-undiagnosed in the displays or my eyeballs, I will be squinting in agony at the objects I would otherwise hold most dear. It’s like an Van Gogh devotee who gets a small electric shock whenever they look at one of his paintings.

There is still the anomaly of the Nexus 6. Perhaps there’s something in the way its display was made that holds the answer. Or perhaps LG will continue to improve its LCD displays to the point where it’ll be clear that it’s the better alternative.

But with my luck? I’m going to need a new drug.

In my last tech-related post, I detailed my year-long persnickety quest to find the One True Phone that I could finally, finally call my own. As I wrote then, I ended up with the LG G4, with a commitment to stick with it for the next year. Luckily, I made very much the right call.

I adore this phone, and I really wish I had picked it up as soon as it was released. Here’s some reasons why.

The most important part of a phone experience for me is the display quality, and this has the best display I’ve ever used. One might argue that it’s Samsung’s Super AMOLED displays on the Galaxies S6 and Note 5 that are the absolute tops, but to my eyes, Super AMOLED causes truly palpable eye strain, especially when I’m doing any long-term reading on the device. (One Reddit commenter suggested it might be due to an imperceptible “flicker” in AMOLED, but I don’t know for sure.) Given that book-reading is one of the primary things I do with a phone, an IPS LCD is by far a better solution. And I’ve never seen a better one than that of the G4. Sharp, vivid, bright, and, importantly to me, very pleasant to read off of.

Now, of course, this phone has the particular quirk of being ever-so-slightly curved. When LG introduced its Flex line of seriously-curved phones, I rolled by eyes. It seemed a pointless gimmick, but now I’m a believer. The curve on the G4, which is far subtler than that of the Flex phones, really does make the phone a joy to hold. It sits happily in the palm, and something about the arc even makes the weight of the phone rest in just the right places. The display isn’t distorted by the curve, and actually feels nicer to swipe around on, with a little swoop you can feel. If anything, I wish the phone had just a bit more of a curve. I lurve the curve.

Like the G3 before it, the buttons are on the back, which is exactly where they should be. It’s so obvious and natural, I can’t believe that this configuration isn’t more common. I can double-click the volume-down button when the screen is off to launch the camera, and double-tap the screen to wake up the phone. Excellent.

The performance is great. It’s not the powerhouse that the Note 5 is, where everything happens absurdly fast, but the G4 is plenty quick. There are occasional instances of lag, weirdly sometimes with the camera shutter, but on the whole, it’s an extremely smooth experience.

Oh right, the camera. It’s phenomenal. I actually like it better than the ostensibly “better” camera on the Note 5, because it looks to me that the G4 gives me more true-to-life images, less saturated, and more finely detailed.

Battery life is fine. I’ve had no problems, and if I did, I can swap the battery out.

And guys, the backs are swappable. The base model I got was a deep blue color, which was okay. The bezel and buttons in blue looked better than the plastic back, which didn’t look great, with an uninteresting diamond pattern. But then I slapped the red leather back on it, and it now looks and feels fantastic. Not like a technology product, but more of an organic object, not unlike a small book. The deep blue buttons popping out of the deep red leather back is really classy looking. It even smells good!

And here’s something I discovered wholly by accident. The other day I had the phone in my hand, I think to grab a picture of my kids doing something silly (as usual), and I needed to deal with a smudge on my glasses. Holding both my spectacles and the phone, I realized that, entirely unintentionally, I had bought a phone that matched my glasses. If you can’t tell from the image below, there are dark-red arms on the specs, dark-blue frames around the lenses.

It really was meant to be.

Tag: lg g4

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