 The G3 from LG is the first of their phones I've reviewed, so it's actually my first experience with their particular flavor of Android. It's got the usual top-of-the-range specs, Snapdragon 801 quad-core, 3 gigs of RAM on my Korean model, and... Well, this is unusual, actually. A 5.5-inch display with a 2560 by 1440 16 by 9 aspect ratio LCD display. That is a stunning 530-plus pixels per inch. With its factory tuning and data center DNA, an Intel 730 Series SSD is an amazing choice for gamers and performance enthusiasts. Physically, the phone floats my boat mostly. The top features an IR blaster and a noise-canceling microphone port. The bottom has a micro-USB charging port, the main microphone, and a 3.5-millimeter jack. And here on the sides, we have... well, actually, not a whole lot of anything. I've been asking someone on the Android side to create a phone without side buttons that are positioned such that I constantly mash them by accident for a while. And I guess LG's solution is to completely remove them. Like the G2, the G3's buttons are on the back. And this ergonomic shift, while a little jarring at first, was something that I actually got used to fairly quickly. And if it enables thinner bezels, then I like the decision. The buttons back here are a lock button and volume up and down that you can use to quick launch the camera or cue memo if you long press them. Also on the back, we find a laser distance finder for the camera, the 13-megapixel camera itself, a two-tone flash, and a speaker port with one watt amplified speaker, or something like that. Anyway, that might have impressed me if it was mounted on the front of the phone. It's loud enough, but nothing can sound quite right pointed away from your ears. This seems like as good a time as any to mention that I think LG nailed it with the backing material on the phone, though. It looks great, it's lighter, it's more difficult to stain, and it can be removed and replaced, unlike most metal designs. On top of that, the phone is still very solidly built. It doesn't feel like a compromised brushed plastic for to win, man. Under it, there's a user replaceable 3000 mAh battery whose performance I can't really comment on because my Korean unit doesn't work for cellular data here. There's a SIM slot, a micro SD slot, and contacts for optional accessories like a wireless charging compatible backplate. Which brings us to the front of the phone. Aside from an LG logo, 2.1-megapixel selfie camera, and a dimmer than I would like RGB LED indicator, this is one clean design. The bezels are slim, it's nearly completely symmetrical with a very small chin, and it is very obvious that LG wants the experience of using this phone to be all about that 5.5-inch quad HD IPS screen. Unfortunately, the screen didn't really float my boat. It's got a lot of pixels, and I'm a major advocate of pushing the envelope technologically, but there's much more to a great screen than resolution. The G3 screen has a warm, yellowish cast that I don't find pleasing, and a noticeably worse contrast ratio than the 1M8 that makes it less pleasant to use than my current daily driver, especially outdoors. Now, I've been informed by others that to fully take advantage of it, I need high-res content like 1440p wallpapers, but I don't really care about wallpapers, and neither do a lot of people. So the only practical benefit for me is that text is ever so slightly sharper when it's extremely small, something that LG seemed to pretty much design their stock keyboard to take advantage of with its tiny symbol indicators. When it comes to moving pictures, though, whether we're talking about games or shows, I can hardly tell the difference between 720p and 1080p at this screen size anyway, so 1440p feels unnecessary when other things could have been improved about the screen instead. Which leads us to the software. We got off to a rough start here. Prompting me during setup to enter a backup contact phone number that sits on my lock screen is genius, but the hardcore EULA that I had to sign made me super uncomfortable, and it's not all bad, though. LG's skin has an attractive, flat appearance that differs in subtle ways from stock Android, but didn't require a crazy learning curve to get the hang of. One thing that impressed me was that it offers a great degree of customizability for a stock skin. You can change the home screen switching animations, change screen off fade-out effects, you can tailor-make your own power-saving schemes, adjust vibration strength, choose between a bajillion different unlock methods, my personal favorite of which is not code, where you just tap certain parts of the screen, and then finally, and this one's a killer, you can customize the functions and locations of the bottom buttons, and even choose whether they are hidden or persistent. It feels like a great balance between a vanilla interface and the tricked-out ones that Android geeks tend to use. The included keyboard is also surprisingly solid. You can tweak a couple of buttons and alter the auto-correct aggressiveness, and backspacing once undoes auto-correct. SwiftKey, are you listening? But there are still a few issues keeping me away, like lack of a customizable long press duration. Being able to adjust the size, though, is great, especially with the very small chin on the G3. It made more of a difference than I expected to get it tuned just right. The settings menu, where all of these tweaks reside, actually annoyed me at first. Its inefficient use of all that screen real estate, even at the smallest font size, felt very TouchWiz-like, but then I found out you can switch to a completely different view, and list mode, I actually found it quite efficient to navigate, so thumbs up there. But, not everything about the UI is fast, and whether it's the high resolution or something else, multitasking is very noticeably slower than the 1M8, and it makes the device feel considerably slower for me, given how often I switch between recent Windows. I also really dislike the way it puts your most recently used application in the top left corner. It should be the opposite, because the fastest part of a smartphone screen to access for right-handed users is the bottom right. It's not all bad, though, you can zoom in and out, unlike Sense, it allows more than 9 items, and compared to stock Android, it's much faster to find things that are buried deeper in the list. Other complaint time now, I guess, LG Health and Smart Tips about using the phone are a complete waste of an entire home screen, I turned that off right away. Adding extra stuff with overlapping functionality to the Google Now swipe up is a big no-no, and managing apps is really weird. Instead of hold dragging to delete within the app tray, that does absolutely nothing as far as I can tell. Instead, you go through the top right menu, where you can change icon size and hide or uninstall apps from there. But, there's more good stuff too. Dual Windows seems crazy useful if you chat while watching videos, the multi-item clipboard is a freaking godsend if you do a lot of copy-pasting, and replying to incoming texts without having to minimize the current app is a big time saver. And the stunning number of user accessibility options makes Sense look stupid. Invert colors, change colors for higher contrast, send a custom message for hearing impaired users, change headphone output so that one side is unbalanced for folks who hear better in one ear, flash alerts for hearing impaired, and I guess Easy Home is the kind of thing I would enable for my grandpa if I thought he needed a top-of-the-line phone in the first place, and I wanted to hide all the functionality from him for some reason. Okay, that last one didn't make a ton of sense, but the other stuff is great. Onto the camera, the laser focus does seem to deliver very fast autofocusing. Auto HDR actually was pretty pleasing to use for me. And aside from the unlabeled settings button, I found the app quite easy and more importantly, fast to use. Dedicated photo and video buttons without needing to switch modes is great. That's something that drives me bananas about the M8. It is so slow to switch modes, and all of the usual top-of-the-line, nice-to-have modes are here. So you got the 13 megapixel still camera, 4K video capture, and 120fps 720p. But while it's cool that the slow-mo on the camera records sound, unfortunately, the recording quality is noticeably worse than the one M8 for video. Lots of jaggies. It's not a huge issue, but one to be aware of if you love taking slow-motion videos of your cats. What are you gonna do? What are you gonna do? I vacuumed your tail. Which leads me to the conclusion. Some overheating issues aside, I didn't encounter them here in the Great White North, by the way, but it's fairly well documented on the web, the G3 is a solid contender. LG delivered a phone that looks beautiful and feels solid, but still managed to deliver optional wireless charging, a microSD slot, and a high-capacity removable battery. The hardware spec is up there with other flagship devices, and even though I'd probably prefer a more vanilla Android experience personally, LG's skin really does feel like a solid middle ground between stock Android and those tricked-out custom launcher, custom everything Android setups that some people use. All of that said, the G3 didn't quite win me over. It's not really LG's fault, but in spite of the very sexy, very thin bezels, the phone is still a touch too wide for me to use comfortably. It's just too big for me to handle, if you know what I mean. But that doesn't mean it won't be perfect for you, and, wouldn't you know it, we've got an opportunity for you to own your very own, to try it out and find out if it's any good. LG is giving us not one, not two, not three, not four, not five, but 25 LG G3 phones to give away to our audience. Yes, 25. Now, there are some caveats. They are pre-production Korean units, which means that unless you're on AT&T or in the US or a number of other carriers worldwide, you won't be able to get certain aspects of the phone working. So maybe you won't get cellular data, for example, and you'll only be able to use it on Wi-Fi and to make phone calls, which is what I can do with mine on the Bell network, but it's still an LG G3. It's still the real deal, fully-fledged phone, and you get to keep it. So, check out the link in the video description on linustechtips.com for full details about how you can get one of those sent to you. Pretty freaking cool. Anyway, guys, like this video if you liked it, dislike it if you disliked it, leave a comment in the bottom of the video telling me if you have any, well, comments about the video. Also in the video description is the support us link where you can buy a t-shirt, give us a monthly contribution if you love our work, or you can even just do something as simple as change your Amazon bookmark to one with our affiliate code so we get a small kickback whenever you buy stuff. I think that pretty much wraps it up, guys, and don't forget to subscribe if you haven't already for more videos just like this one.