THIS is Why The LG G5 Will Be Better Than The Galaxy S7

A Few Points on Why The LG G5 Will Almost Certainly Be Better Than The Galaxy S7

MWC 2016 is literally just around the corner: Samsung and LG will launch both their respective handsets on Sunday night, February 21st, a day before Europe’s biggest technology expo kicks off in earnest.

Two of the biggest launches at this year’s expo will be the Samsung Galaxy S7 and the LG G5. There will be a smattering of other launches as well from Google’s smaller hardware partners. But for the most part the Galaxy S7 and LG G5 will be the talk of the town -- hence why both companies opted to launch BEFORE the convention kicks off.

Usually, all eyes are on Samsung. It is the biggest player in the Android space, obviously, and it has been producing pretty decent phones for a good number of years now, although I’d argue the company does its best work with its Note range, which makes the Note 5’s absence in the UK that much harder to bear.

Samsung likes to think of itself as “The Apple of The Android Space” -- basically, it makes world’s second most popular phone brand, with its Galaxy S series. Since around the time of the Galaxy S5, though, things haven’t exactly been going swimmingly for Samsung: sales are down, year on year, as is revenue and market share. Heads even rolled at board level too.

The Galaxy S6 series was meant to be Samsung’s signal to the world that everything was alright; that it could still make great phones and, NO, it hadn’t lost its flair for design. But despite arguably achieving this goal (in our view, anyway) neither the Galaxy S6 nor its EDGE counterpart managed to reignite the public's’ love affair with Samsung. Apple won the sales wars in 2014, 2015 and -- if early indications are anything to go by -- 2016 as well. And this is bad news for Samsung.

What’s even worse, though, is that Samsung’s frienemy, fellow Korean firm, LG, has slowly been building traction in the background, earning solid reviews across the board for its well thought out and brilliantly executed phones. The LG G3 and LG G4 were just excellent, easily two of the best handsets from 2014 and 2015, and I was also a big fan of the company’s LG G Flex 2, though that handset is somewhat less well known in the UK.

All this hard work on LG’s part is now starting to pay off; internet search is dominated by people dying to know more about the upcoming LG G5, how it will compare to the Galaxy S7 and when it will be available to buy as well as how much it will cost. What’s clear is LG is VERY confident with what it is coming to market with in 2016, so confident in fact that one exec even said the company, and I quote, “was READY to take on Samsung in 2016”.

I think LG’s G5 will have Samsung’s Galaxy S7 beat in several departments when both handsets are announced on Feb. 21 but the most obvious, I feel, will be design. LG likely knows -- like we think we know -- that Samsung wouldn’t do much to the look and feel of the Galaxy S7, not after such a big change last year. This means LG can come out guns blazing with a completely revamped design that’ll make the Galaxy S7 look, well, a bit incremental.

And the rumours suggest this will almost certainly be the case: the leaked pics of the Galaxy S7, and there have been A LOT, show a very familiar looking handset, while the ones of the LG G5 are, well, a lot more interesting with weird, modules and bumps. LG was first with QHD and you can bet your ASS it’ll be first with a few more things this weekend too.

Another area LG is likely to score big is expandable storage and the G5’s battery. Samsung famously stopped offering removable batteries a few generations ago. Ditto microSD-support. And this REALLY angered a lot of its users. Samsung has apparently re-introduced microSD inside the Galaxy S7 but, because of the device’s unibody design, it cannot make the battery removable -- ever again!

Guess what LG has gone and done? Yep: you guessed it -- included both MicroSD-support AND removable batteries inside its 2016 flagship. Beyond this, though, I’d expect the handsets to be rather similar with QHD panels, 3-4GB of RAM, up to 128GB of storage, decent imaging technology and bigger-than-last-year batteries, hopefully 4000mAh ones.

Personally, I am much more interested in the LG G5. I just feel like LG is more in tune with what the average Android user wants from a phone these days, while Samsung seems more focussed on forcing features like its EDGE display onto users when all most of them seem to want is more storage, better battery life and access to the battery.