LG Stylo 5 Smartphone with Built-In Stylus Review – Inexpensive Galaxy Note Alternative?

We get you in some lower cost smartphones and we got one in the other day through the Amazon vine program that I thought you all might find of interest. This is the LG stylo 5. It sells for about two hundred and twenty dollars to Amazon members, and you get a bunch of Amazon stuff pre installed, and the cool thing with this phone, for the price point is that it has an integrated stylus and some apps that work specifically with the stylus, Which we’ll explore here in a few minutes, but I do want to let you know in the interest of full disclosure at this – did come in free of charge through the Amazon vine program. However, all the opinions you’re about to hear are my own. Nobody is paying for this review, nor is anyone reviewed or approved what you’re about to see before it was uploaded, so let’s get to it now and see what this phone is all about. So let’s take a closer look now at the hardware. This phone is unlocked, and here in the US it will work with every major wireless carrier, so that includes ATampT t mobile, Sprint and Verizon, and it will also work with the services that work off of those main carriers, the MB and O’s that are out there. So you should have very broad compatibility here in the US and that’s. One of the things that I often caution. People about is that when you buy phones from overseas, they often don’t work with all the carriers.

Here. This one does so that was good to see. 6.2 inch display on this one. It is 2160 by 1080. It has three gigabytes of RAM and 32 gigabytes of integrated storage, but note only fifteen point: seven gigs were really available to us. When we got everything installed and running, you can install an SD card on it up to two terabytes, which we will show you in a few minutes here it is powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon, 450 processor. We typically see these on low cost phones. It is not all that fast; it will certainly feel a bit sluggish compared to some of the flagship phones out there, but I think for a lot of consumers. This might do just fine it’s, not all that heavy. It weighs about six point: three ounces or 179 grams it’s got a glass front here on the begun on the front of the screen. It looks like it’s plastic here on the back, doesn’t feel like glass to me and, as you can see, it picks up fingerprints. Very very easily: this is only after a couple of days of handling it so I’m constantly rubbing it off to get the fingerprints and grease off the back of it. So that’s one thing, you’ll experience here, both on the front of the display and the back of it. It does have face detection built in which you saw there. They warn you that it’s, not something you’ll want to use.

If you want to keep the phone very secure, so the other option is just to use the fingerprint sensor here on the back, which is more secure than the facial detection. It is running Android 9.0. You don’t have much reports on here. There is a charging port here at the bottom, which is a USBC port. This is only used for charging and data transfer. It doesn’t support displays so some of the higher end smartphones now can output to an external display. This won’t be able to do that through the port here at the bottom, but you can fast charge via USB see and they include a fast charging adapter here in the box. You also have a headphone jack, which is lacking on a lot of smartphones these days, but I was not very impressed with the speaker here at the bottom. It is not very loud. It really sounds a bit distorted, very lousy, speakerphone thing here. So if you spend a lot of time on the speakerphone, this is probably not going to be the phone for you. I will get to the stylus and some of the things you can do with that in a few minutes here. On the other side, here you’ve got a volume rocker up and down on the top. You have nothing. It looks like just a microphone here and, of course, you’ve got some room for the antennas. This, in addition to supporting cellular networks, the 4G LTE networks also works with wireless AC when you’re at home and, of course, has bluetooth built in for connecting up other peripherals and whatnot over here you’ve got your power switch, and that is pretty much it now.

The phone only supports one SIM card at a time. So, if you are traveling a lot and switching networks, frequently you’ll need to pop out the tray here and swap the cards. The larger slot here is for the microSD card that you can install to augment the onboard storage. I did notice, though, that there’s a rubber gasket around the SIM tray, so although the phone is not being advertised as waterproof I’m guessing, this will provide a little bit of protection from splashes and rain and stuff, but you’ll probably want to put a case around it. Anyhow, just to protect your investment here, there are two cameras on it: you’ve got one here on the back. This is a 13 megapixel camera. The photo quality, as you can see here, is not spectacular, but it’s passable, so you can at least get a couple of pictures taken with it without too many issues it does support video but 1080p at 30 frames per second. Only video quality is not spectacular, although it does attempt to do some digital stabilization of the video while you’re walking around so not a very good video shooter kind of a passable photo device, and you also have a 5 megapixel selfie camera there with a pretty nice Wide angle to it, as you can see here, pictures are okay coming out of it, but not spectacular again. It will, though, shoot 1080p video out of that front facing camera, but again not a very good video shooter out of either lens, but overall, a passable camera system for a low price phone.

Now the standout feature of this phone, though, is its integrated stylus. When you pull it out, you will feel the phone vibrate a bit and then you’ve got a few different apps that you can load up. So we have one here called pop memo which will overlay a writing surface on top of whatever you’re doing and, as you can see, as I write here, it’s, not picking up my hand resting against the screen, but it is picking up the stylus as I’m. Drawing on it, so that was good feels pretty responsive, there’s, no smart stuff going on with the stylus, though it is strictly a capacitive surface. It might be hard to see here on screen so will give you a better b roll shot of it, but it’s a rounded nub at the end of the stylus, which will make it very difficult to get fine details done here. But I think it’s good enough for doing quick notes and that sort of thing in addition to getting that pop memo thing, you have a few other things that you can play around with as well, including a coloring book. So you can pull up a drawing here and color it in if you want with different colors and everything, they also have a few other things like a drawing chat where you can chat with other people just by drawing on screen with some funky effects to the Writing here so pretty cool little stylus and it will work outside of just these apps is a capacitive thing.

After all, so I can load up other applications, for example, and get around that way with it. So a nice little feature to have on an inexpensive phone. Just make sure you don’t lose it because I don’t think they sell replacements for this, so you’ll want to make sure it stays securely in there. It does snap in pretty securely and then you do have to give it a little bit of a tug to pull it out now, because this phone is being sold through Amazon. It does integrate the Amazon voice system with it, otherwise known as the a word, and what you can do here, rather than issuing a voice command, is just double tap on the power button. Let show me the weather in New York City today and then that will go out and pull up the the weather information there and you can hear just how lousy that speaker is on this phone. So you can get all of your Amazon echo functionality. Out of the phone here, however, I could not figure out a way to get it to work with just a trigger word. It looks like it has to be done with the power button here. When you get the phone, they advise you to update all of the Amazon apps on it, so you can get that functionality working, and you also have to set the a word as the default voice assistant but again, I’m. Finding it doesn’t seem to respond to just the command by itself, so you’ll definitely need to be pushing that button every time you want to get it, but if you have a lot of other things going on in the Amazon ecosystem, this will certainly do well for That the performance of the phone overall is not bad, like I said, it’s going to feel a little sluggish compared to some other stuff out there.

But if we go over to the nasa.gov website here you can see things spring up pretty quickly. The display looks nice it’s, very sharp, it’s nice to have a 1080p display in something this small, so things are really sharp and colors are very well balanced here. A very nice display, LG does put together some nice displays because they manufacture them themselves and they’re, putting them into their phones here so overall from the look and feel it’s pretty good and if you’re watching a lot of videos on your phone. They’Ll look nice on here because again it is a 1080p display, nice and sharp. The colors are very well balanced and overall I found it to be a very good movie watching experience for a low cost phone. You will see that when I switch orientations here will it’ll kind of pause for a second before it read, draws everything so having the slower processor will be noticed in some areas, but really it’s, not a bad experience, and video playback on here is quite nice. Now, due to its slower processor, this is not going to be a gaming powerhouse, but most of the games that are written for smartphones target these low end devices, so things like goat simulator here actually run pretty nicely on this device again. You’Ll feel a little sluggishness when things first load up, but once you get into the game, it seems to go pretty well here. So I think, if you’re looking for some casual game play on your phone every once in a while, this will probably be just as good as the phone you’re currently using.

If you typically buy phones at around this price point it’s. Definitely an improvement over where the 200 phones were two years ago, but again not where the flagships are, but the screen is nice, as you can see here. This game is running quite well very decent frame rate here, and I think from that standpoint, it’s going to be a good experience a little bit earlier. We loaded up the dolphin emulator that did not run very well on here at all, so I think you could probably emulate some of the 8 and 16 bit consoles from the 80s and 90s. But if you get into some of the higher end stuff, like the Dreamcast or the Gamecube, those things will not play as well on this device. Now the 3dmark sling shot benchmark test. We got a score of 811. That puts it definitely on the low end of the scale when looking at similar phones, we tested the honor eight about a year or two ago, and that one did better than this one did, and you can see also how it stacks up against the iPhone 6s From a couple of years, back as well so again, not a spectacular performer here, but I think good enough for a bulk of the Android gaming library. Now battery life out of the phone isn’t too bad it’s got a 3500 milliamp hour battery inside. We left it on standby all weekend that it was able to maintain a good level of charge throughout that weekend of not being used.

I would say that if you are using the phone during the day rather frequently, you should be able to get through the entire day before you need to charge it again. So that was good to see, but everyone’s battery life is going to vary based on usage. If you’re playing games on the phone all day long, that is going to pack the battery more significantly than maybe picking it up every 20 or 30 minutes to check email or a website or something so your usage is going to have an impact here. Also, the distance that you are from your nearby cellular towers will also have an impact, but overall, I think for most folks. They’Ll get a full day of use out of this thing before they have to charge it again and you’ll probably get even more time out of it. If you’re not picking it up all that much and leaving it mostly in standby mode. So that was good to see. Another cool thing I discovered when I was plugging some things into the USBC port is that the phone can actually act as a power bank. So you have the option to send power to another device if you want, so that was pretty cool. I just note, though, that it does not support wireless charging, even though it looks like it might with that shiny back on here. It can only charge through its USB C port, so overall I’m pleased with this phone it’s amazing what you can get for 220 bucks these days and I think you’re going to love the display on it.

It’S, nice and big, very bright, good resolution on it. All in a fantastic display, the stylus here is probably the killer feature of this phone, and I think a lot of people who prefer to take quick notes by hand are really going to love having this with them all the time so that’s a kind of a Standout feature in this price range. I don’t, though, like the speakerphone, the speaker here is terrible and if you are someone that does a lot with your speaker phone, this is not going to be the phone for you, the Bluetooth and the headphone jack work. Fine. So those are workarounds, but the speaker itself here is just lousy. The handset speaker isn’t bad. So if you’re holding the phone up to your ear, that will be okay, but by and large they could have done a lot better. I think on the speaker here, the facial recognition and the fingerprint worked great on this and all together, not bad for the price point. Don’T expect a lot, but I think you’ll like what you see here, given how little you’ll pay for it it’s great to see. Also that it’s got a universal carrier compatibility here in the US as well. You will scratch up the back here, because it is plastic. It attracts a lot of fingerprints as you can see. So there are some things that will give you some indicator as to what its price point is, but overall, I think they’ve packed a lot of value into this low cost device until next time.

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