LG G5 modular phone: Hi-Fi DAC, battery slide out, connection interface

I'm so glad LG are sticking with a switchable battery - it's a must have feature for me. Lots of people have forgotten what it's like to grab a wall-charged battery, slip it in and run out the door with 100% power in a few seconds. Tethering your phone to the wall sucks. Clunky portable battery packs are the worst. I hope this phone sells well, it has my support.

This might give people a taste for what really modular devices like Ara can offer, but the fact that it doesn&#x27;t do battery swaps without powering down is going to make it far less interesting to people. An internal battery to give you 30-60s in an emergency hibernate mode would have been game-changing.<p>Kudos to LG for actually taking this step though. With luck this will whet the appetite for phones that are truly modular (and show manufacturers that there is a market for swappable parts).

It appears that LG is the only company to dare offer real innovation on its flagship models. I don&#x27;t know how well this model will do but it seems it&#x27;s not just a faster rehash of last year&#x27;s model.

- Replaceable battery is always good<p>- Proper camera handle and better DAC too, but not as mutually exclusive modules<p>What I want is:<p>- A robust and replaceable bumper that integrates with the design (i.e. isn&#x27;t ugly). The phone should not be designed as if the user isn&#x27;t going to slap an ugly case on it.<p>- A hole for a wrist strap so I don&#x27;t worry I&#x27;m gonna drop my phone. All cameras have one, but now that phones are taking over, none have it.<p>- An unlocked bootloader that doesn&#x27;t void your warranty. Or even better lets you set the signing key on first use (a sort of Trust On First Use that the user is the owner).

Rant.<p>It really bugs me when consumers ask for more features regardless of their feasibility, here we have a great phone with changebale batteries and yet we ask for it to be still on while we swap the batteries! Hasn&#x27;t it occurred to us that maybe it&#x27;s technically difficult to add in a supercap. Just be thankful. This is like constentaly asking for phones with more RAM and processing power, I am really glad Moore&#x27;s law has come to end, maybe now consumers will be faced with the harsh truth that it is not simple to keep on creating more powerful devices for them to watch cat videos on.

Modularity comes with a price in form of wasted space. Nevertheless, this is something completely fresh from a major smartphone vendor. And it is done with their flagship phone. That&#x27;s the spirit.

My &quot;is it worth even thinking about a particular device&quot; litmus test is &quot;can it run CM&quot;. Unfortunately that&#x27;s impossible to tell for future devices, most of the time.

I wonder if the bootloader will be unlockable. I&#x27;ve been spoiled by Nexus devices for years and I remember how much work the Galaxy S3 I briefly owned was.<p>What&#x27;s LG&#x27;s track record like with releasing sources? Nexus devices don&#x27;t count.

I think its good of LG to design a phone that is good for the environment in the sense that users can swap the battery and upgrade the storage instead of having to buy a whole new phone when those run out of capacity.<p>Global warming dictates that we as consumers not only our politicians are responsible for the future we create. If manufacturers can help make devices that last longer I´m going to choose such a device the next time I buy a phone.<p>I think its bold of LG to think differently and stick out of the crowd of similar phones. Like that you can upgrade the storage capacity via MicroSD cards.

I&#x27;ve been a loyal Samsung owner since S3. Didn&#x27;t upgrade to S6 because they dropped removable battery. Was waiting to see if it&#x27;s brought back with S7 - it&#x27;s not.<p>Will be getting this phone as an upgrade. For me removable battery and SD Card in a flagship phone are a must. Then comes camera quality, then price.

Random note, I recently used an old Nexus S as a mp3 player. I was surprised by the sound texture of crappy mp3 over my 10$ panasonic earclips... I started to wonder if the hardware wasn&#x27;t responsible. According to some people it embeds a Wolfson DAC (of Wolfson DAC fame ~_~). It does makes a significant difference.

<i>Press a tiny button on the G5&#x27;s edge and the bottom and battery easily separate from the phone.</i><p>Incidentally, several years ago Chinese manufacturer Jiayu made an iPhone-looking phone also called the G5 and having a dedicated button to release the back cover:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;amirexpress.ir&#x2F;index.php?route=product&#x2F;product&amp;product_id=161" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;amirexpress.ir&#x2F;index.php?route=product&#x2F;product&amp;produc...</a>

I want a better ADC, even more than I want a better DAC (though both would be best). I&#x27;d like a high quality recording device for the field...a phone or tablet would be perfect, but there&#x27;s no good way, that I know of, to get the signal into the device at high quality.

Snapdragon 820 features <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.qualcomm.com&#x2F;products&#x2F;snapdragon&#x2F;processors&#x2F;820" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.qualcomm.com&#x2F;products&#x2F;snapdragon&#x2F;processors&#x2F;820</a>

The Fairphone2 was already modular before this... <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;shop.fairphone.com&#x2F;spareparts.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;shop.fairphone.com&#x2F;spareparts.html</a>

Any hints on the price yet?

I guess the battery swapping could be useful, but I&#x27;d rather spend the money on quality components in it from the get-go than have the option to buy extra, replaceable components.

I had a LG Nexus 4 and the battery got bloated after a year of use. When I tried to get help, LG just ignored me even though that was a safety issue. Thumbs down on it.

Really really wish LG was making the Nexus this time around. But it seems that HTC is doing it using a fairly meh design of the M10.

Internal battery is only 2,800mAh :-(

Beginning of a new Era! I hope google launches it&#x27;s Project Ara soon.

I don&#x27;t know what a DAC is. What&#x27;s a DAC?

I wonder if we&#x27;ll finally get sub 2ms audio latency from an android device via this dac, or whether its just going to be very nice quality audio with 100ms latency.

Interesting phone, horrible article. Typical of the modern Engadget, the article is light on facts and heavy on superlatives. For instance, I had to head over to some random Android website (androidHeadlines) to find out that yes, it does have Micro SD card support, and that it has 32GB of built-in storage (pathetic, Engadget). I <i>do</i> really like the idea of extensive expandability, but I wish it could be standardized somehow (admittedly difficult in a mobile form factor). I think this would encourage the creation of interesting devices by interesting startups, which is something that would probably get everybody here excited.<p>If you want a decent article by a respectable pub, check out the Ars version (linked below). It has all of the technical info that Engadget missed, minus the comments on how &#x27;fantastic&#x27; the device feels.<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;arstechnica.com&#x2F;gadgets&#x2F;2016&#x2F;02&#x2F;lg-g5-hands-on-lg-may-have-made-the-most-innovative-phone-of-mwc&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;arstechnica.com&#x2F;gadgets&#x2F;2016&#x2F;02&#x2F;lg-g5-hands-on-lg-may...</a>

Not sure why they would cripple it with just 32GB of internal storage. Too much Android stuff refuses to run from, or store data on, the SDCard.