[Q] Looking to buy G3, questions

If you like the Nexus then you'll love the g3. Its the big brother of the Nexus. I say go for it.


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Nosferatu. said:

As title states...

I'm the primary account holder and bought my Galaxy S4 out right. Well I'm thinking of using one of the lines that has jump and swapping it out for the LG G3 for myself (and give the S4 to the other party).

1.) How does the T-Mobile variant differ from the international version?

2.) Does it have FM included in it?

3.) How easy is this thing to root/flash recovery? Does it come with a locked bootloader? If so, how do you unlock it? I'm coming from owning Galaxy and Nexus products and all had no bootloader problems so I'm a bit leery going to another manufacturer.

4.) How's battery life on this device? I've just about had my fair share of TouchWiz and Samsung (even with AOKP on it as we speak). I really enjoy my fiance's Nexus 5 the way I had it set up but my biggest pet peeve is the battery is small and limited on that device

5.) Most important question, does anyone have any experience with the Xperia Z2 as well? This was the phone I really wanted to get but I can't justify spending $600 on eBay with no warranty on a device versus basically a free upgrade (I pay for all the lines on the account). Any thoughts on the camera on the LG G3 compared to the other flagships (e.g. Xperia Z2, Galaxy S5, Lumina, iPhone)? I use the camera a lot and some reviews I saw said it can be washed out and isn't the greatest.

Thanks for the help. :good:

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1. WiFi calling, you don't get an antenna(only works on korea), unlocked bootloader, and you don't get headphones nor a spare battery in the box like the korean version. I think the international phone brings headphones.

2. It's incredibly easy thanks to the developers. Root/recovery is available for T-Mobile. Root is available to everyone except sprint(coming soon). Only T-Mobile has recovery so far.

3. Everyone's usage is different but I love the battery if this phone. I easily get 16-20 hrs of standby and 5-5.5 of screen time.

4. I have no experience with the Z2 but I really like the G3 camera. There are picture threads on the T-Mobile and regular g3 sections that you can take a look at.

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No FM, not sure which phones even have it since it's not a feature I look for.

Battery life is much better than it was for me with the N5. I used Greenify and Lux brightness to keep it low on the N5 and I would still be under 15% at night with maybe 1.5 hours of screen time, at the most.

The G3 has been much better. I went to bed last night with 22 % left after 12 hours of use and 2.5 hours of screen time. I had never achieved that on the Nexus 5. I have a ton of apps that wake up the phone: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Hangouts, SMS, Google Music runs often. I even spent all day off of work's WiFi. Today I have turned it on, so we'll see if battery life improves. I had also turned off WiFi when screen is off due to the privacy bug, but today I enabled it again to see how much impact it has on the battery.

I am not a fan of Samsung devices and dislike Touchwiz. The skin on the G3 is pretty decent. It's not very intrusive, and even though I miss some of the N5's icons and cleaner notification drawer and status bar, the G3 has a pretty clean interface without having to disable everything.

The big advantage of the Tmo version is we already have a recovery, so we should be able to get more tweaks in ROMs soon.

I have been unable to get tethering to work (without the usage counting towards your tether bucket), and there are reports of international roaming issues.

Phone is running 4.4.2, and I'm not sure how good LG will be with an L update, but I don't think they'd be too bad. Hopefully a GPE version comes along and we can convert the phone to that.

The camera is pretty good, much better than my N5. The built in camera app does a pretty sh**ty job at auto White Balance in low light, but it is fast. I haven't used a Z2 in person, but the Z1 I tried a while back didn't blow me away in terms of camera quality. This one doesn't blow me away either, but it's an improvement over what I had before. I always had to use HDR+ mode on the N5, which meant photos took a long time, but they came out pretty good. I do miss HDR+ for low light photos.

You can use hdr on the g3 camera app.

http://xdaforums.com/showthread.php?t=2821005

[ROOT / TWRP][D851 ONLY][OSX/Linux/Windows] Root/TWRP your TMO G3 with PurpleDrake!

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IXChicharitoXI said:

You can use hdr on the g3 camera app.

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You can, but it's not nearly as good as Google's exclusive HDR+ I keep forgetting to see if someone has ported the feature over to another device.

---------- Post added at 03:50 PM ---------- Previous post was at 03:49 PM ----------

adamfair said:

http://xdaforums.com/showthread.php?t=2821005

[ROOT / TWRP][D851 ONLY][OSX/Linux/Windows] Root/TWRP your TMO G3 with PurpleDrake!

Sent from my LG-D851 using XDA Free mobile app

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Yup, all done for you in a script, or you can do it manually if you so desire. I did it on mine and I have TWRP (it looks funny because it only takes about two thirds of the screen) and root.

Nosferatu. said:

As title states...

I'm the primary account holder and bought my Galaxy S4 out right. Well I'm thinking of using one of the lines that has jump and swapping it out for the LG G3 for myself (and give the S4 to the other party).

Click to expand...

Click to collapse

1.) As noted above, the T-Mobile G3 has does not come with earbuds or a spare battery. It does support Qi wireless charging, if you have the right cover.
2.) No FM radio.
3.) T-Mobile G3 bootloader is unlocked out of the box. Rooting is brain-dead simple, thanks to PurpleDrake.
4.) Battery life is above average, but not exceptional. My old Note 2 went longer between charges, but my G3 always has >20% left at the end of the day, so I can't complain. It really depends on how you use the phone. You could completely drain it playing heavy 3D games or watching Netflix all day, but that would drain any device (except perhaps a Droid Maxx)
5.) I have no experience with the Xperia Z2, so I cannot comment about that.

polo045 said:

If you like the Nexus then you'll love the g3. Its the big brother of the Nexus. I say go for it.

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Not necessarily. If you like the "vanilla" android experience of the Nexus 5, then you might not care for the LG UI. It is less laggy than Touchwiz, but it's still there. People that are used to no-frills style of AOSP might be turned off by the LG UI. Of course, that will change once the G3 gets cyanogenmod support, but that is down the road.

Nosferatu. said:

YAY! Phone rocks. Got it rooted and whatnot. Don't see much out there yet for development. Anyways, how do we go about getting wireless charging? I noticed it doesn't come with anything out of the box stock.

Killer screen.

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You can get the quick case, it replaces the back and has wireless charging. If you don't like the flip cover (I don't), you can get a back cover with wireless charging. There's a Verizon version that has been confirmed to work with our D851.