LG K10 LTE review
As you can see, there is no dearth of good smartphones in the budget segment and all of these phones have their own specialty. Will LG’s new offering find its place in this crowd? Today we will know in the review of LG K10 LTE.
Look and Design
The first thing that attracts attention in this smartphone is its glossy pebble design. There are no sharp lines on the body of the phone. The rear cover is textured. This phone with round design can be held comfortably in the hand. The phone is quite light and even with the battery its weight is only 142 grams.
The K10 LTE sports a 5.3-inch HD in-cell display that makes text and images look crisp. The protective glass of the phone is not screen-proof so the phone already comes with a screen guard. However, this screen guard does not cover the entire front part. Colors look good on the screen and the display can be easily read even in sunlight. The phone is a little slow to respond to changes in ambient light and transitions can be a little bumpy. There is also no notification LED in the phone.
The headphone socket and micro-USB port of the phone are given at the bottom and the power and volume buttons are on the rear, which is LG’s signature style. We found the volume buttons of the phone to be a bit soft as we accidentally pressed them several times while using the phone. The textured rear cover gives good grip to the phone. We can say that the LG K10 LTE is one of the most beautiful budget plastic phones available in the market today. Our Indigo color variant review unit looks great but you can also choose between White and Gold as per your choice.
When you buy LG K10 LTE, you get a 4.3 watt charger, USB cable, headset and flip case. With this case, you can see basic notifications in the phone like weather, battery life and time and date information. The quality of the case is fine but other accessories could be better.
Specifications and Software
LG has introduced several variants of this smartphone for different markets. The K10 LTE (K420ds) launched in India has a quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 410 processor. The phone has 2 GB RAM. Despite being old, it is a powerful processor but due to Snapdragon 615 or 616 processors coming in less than Rs 10,000 today, it can be called a bit old. Internal storage is 16 GB which can be expanded up to 32 GB with the help of microSD card.
The LG K10 LTE supports 4G on the first SIM with VoLTE on Indian bands. Whereas the second SIM supports 3G data SIM. It is not easy to change the SIM in the phone quickly. If you remove one SIM or insert another SIM, the phone will have to be rebooted. For connectivity, other features like Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n, Bluetooth 4.1, FM radio and GPS are also available. Fingerprint sensor, NFC and USB OTG support are also not present in the phone.
The phone launched in India will come with Android 5.1 variant while some of its variants are expected to come with Android Marshmallow. It is expected that the Indian variant will get OTA update soon. The phone comes with LG’s custom user interface which is good to use. The K10 LTE has a traditional app drawer interface. The Android navigation strip at the bottom along with an additional button to take screenshots, notification shade and SIM switcher can be customised.
This LG smartphone can be customized well. You can change the lockscreen and homescreen animations. You can add new themes from the Smartworld app. You can activate or lock the screen by double tapping. The notification shade houses toggle switches, brightness and volume sliders. Like LG’s expensive phones, it does not have floating apps but if you are using any app, you will get floating notifications when you receive a call.
Sub-menus in the Settings app can be viewed as tabs, which we found easier to navigate. Talking about pre-installed apps, there are apps like File Manager, LG Backup, QuickMemo+ (which can be synced with Google Calendar), RemoteCall Service and Tasks.
performance
Due to its easy and lightweight UI we get 1.4 GB RAM free for the app almost all the time. The general performance of the phone was good. However, we did have some trouble switching from one app to another and bringing down the notification shade. There is no problem in call quality on 4G network in the phone. The stock LG keyboard is also convenient to use. The flip cover does make the phone a little heavy, but without it, the K10 LTE fits very easily in the pocket. We liked this feature of the phone a lot. Due to there being a lot of plastic around the screen, it is not always possible to use the phone with one hand.
There is no problem in playing high-vibration video files in LG K10 LTE. But the phone does not support all audio codes. Even with MX Player, we were not able to play AC3 audio during file testing. The music player does not support ‘FLAC’. The headset that comes with the phone is great for voice calls but just okay for media playback. Apart from this, the earbuds are also not very convenient. The rear speaker is quite loud for alerts but it is also not very good for music.
K10 LTE has 13 megapixel rear camera and 5 megapixel front camera. The rear camera captures decent landscape and macro photos in daylight. Focusing and saving photos is slow and the camera becomes slow in low light. In good light, colors and details in macro shots are better than in landscape, but in photos and videos taken in low light, the detail is less and the quality also falls. And this deficiency is clearly visible in the pictures when zoomed. The front camera doesn’t take very good pictures.
We saw both good and bad things in LG’s camera app. You will have the option of a shutter button and on the other side you will see settings in the viewfinder or you will have to remove them. A picture can be taken by touching anywhere.
There aren’t too many options in the camera app when it comes to settings and shooting modes. The app has a timer and voice or gesture triggers for taking selfies. However, common filters like HDR and panorama mode are also missing. This also makes it difficult to take wide landscape photos on the phone.
battery life
The 2300 mAh battery provided in LG K10 LTE lasted for 10 hours and 24 minutes in our video loop test, which can be called good. Due to lack of quick charge technology in the phone, you may have to wait for a long time for the phone to be fully charged. The phone gets charged only about 16 percent in half an hour. According to today’s standards, this charging speed cannot be called good at all. The good thing is that the phone does not drain the battery quickly during normal use. We were able to easily use the phone for a day even while using 4G and Wi-Fi.
our decision
LG has kept the price of K10 LTE at Rs 13,750, which is very high considering all these specifications and features. The phone seems like it can’t compete and it’s hard to justify the price with these features in mid-2016. Apart from the design of the phone, good screen and excellent battery life, there is nothing special in the phone that can justify this price.
LG needs to improve the pricing of the K10 LTE if it expects the phone to be successful in India.
