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 be able to make its place in this crowd? Today we will find out in the review of LG K10 LTE.
Look and design
The first thing that catches 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 a round design can be held comfortably in the hand. The phone is very 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 on the phone is not screen-proof so the phone comes with a pre-applied screen guard. However, the screen guard does not cover the entire front side. Colours look good on the screen and the display is easily readable even in bright sunlight. The phone is a little slow to respond when ambient light changes and transitions can be a bit awkward. There is no notification LED on the phone either.
The headphone socket and micro-USB port are placed at the bottom and the power and volume buttons are at the rear, which is LG’s signature style. We found the volume buttons a little soft as we accidentally pressed them a few times while using the phone. The textured rear cover gives the phone a good grip. We can say that the LG K10 LTE is one of the most beautiful budget plastic phones available in the market today. Our Indigo colour variant review unit looks stunning but you can also choose white or gold colour as per your choice.
When you buy the LG K10 LTE, you get a 4.3 watt charger, USB cable, headset and flip case. With this case, you can see basic notifications on the phone such as weather, battery life and time and date. The quality of the case is good but other accessories could be better.
Specifications and software
LG has launched 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 of RAM. Despite being old, it is a powerful processor, but today it can be called a bit old due to the Snapdragon 615 or 616 processors coming in less than Rs 10,000. The internal storage is 16 GB which can be expanded up to 32 GB with the help of a microSD card.
LG K10 LTE supports 4G on Indian bands with VoLTE on the first SIM only. While the second SIM supports 3G data SIM. It is not easy to change SIMs quickly in the phone. If you remove or insert a SIM, the phone will have to reboot. Other connectivity features like Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n, Bluetooth 4.1, FM radio and GPS are also present in the phone. 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. K10 LTE has a traditional app drawer interface. Along with the Android navigation strip given at the bottom, an additional button for taking screenshots, notification shade and SIM switcher can be customized.
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 has a toggle switch, brightness and volume slider. It does not have floating apps like the expensive LG phones, but if you are using any app and receive a call, you will get floating notifications.
The sub-menus in the Settings app can be viewed as tabs, which we found easier to navigate. Talking about the pre-installed apps, there are apps like File Manager, LG Backup, QuickMemo+ (which can be synced with Google Calendar), RemoteCall Service and Tasks.
Performance
Thanks to its simple and lightweight UI, we were able to find 1.4GB of RAM free for apps almost all the time. The overall performance of the phone was good. However, we did face some difficulty in switching between apps and pulling down the notification shade. The call quality on 4G networks was smooth and the stock LG keyboard was also comfortable to use. The flip cover does make the phone a bit bulky, but without it, the K10 LTE fits easily in a pocket. We really liked this feature of the phone. There is a lot of plastic around the screen, which makes it difficult to use the phone with one hand all the time.
There is no problem in playing high-vibration video files on the LG K10 LTE. But the phone does not support all audio codecs. We were not able to play AC3 audio even with MX Player during file testing. The music player does not support ‘Flac’. The headset that comes with the phone is great for voice calls but is 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 not very good for music either.
The K10 LTE has a 13-megapixel rear camera and a 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 sluggish in low light. Macro shots taken in good light have better colours and detail than landscape shots but photos and videos taken in low light have less detail and the quality also drops. And this deficiency is clearly visible in the photos when zoomed in. The front camera does not take very good photos.
We found both good and bad things in LG’s camera app. You have the option of a shutter button and on the other side you will see settings in the viewfinder or you have to delete them. You can take a picture by touching anywhere.
The camera app doesn’t have many options when it comes to settings and shooting modes. The app has a timer and voice or gesture triggers for taking selfies. However, there are no common filters like HDR and panorama mode. This also makes it difficult to take wide landscape photos on the phone.
battery life
The 2300mAh battery in LG K10 LTE lasted for 10 hours and 24 minutes in our video loop test, which is good. Since the phone does not have quick charge technology, you may have to wait a long time for the phone to charge completely. 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 battery does not drain 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 priced the K10 LTE at Rs 13,750 which is way too high for the specifications and features it offers. The phone seems to be a no-brainer and it is hard to justify this price with these features in mid-2016. Apart from the design, good screen and great battery life, there is nothing special in the phone that justifies this price.
LG needs to improve the pricing of the K10 LTE if it hopes to make the phone a success in India.