LG’s budget offering fails to impress
The LG K10 LTE is a budget smartphone from the Korean giant and falls under the popular made-in-India programme. The device comes with handy specs and mainly targets the people who want a good brand product at an affordable price. The LG K10 is available for Rs 12,499 at Flipkart, a price segment which is quite crowded. So, let’s check out if the LG K10 is the phone to buy under Rs 15,000.
Build and design
The LG K10 comes with a plastic body and polymerized rubber finish at the back. It feels light weight and comfortable to hold, and size is not too big since one can easily access everything with one hand. The edges are curved, and adds to the comfortable handling. The textured finish at the rear not only makes for good gripping, but also make the backplate resilient against scratches.
Along with the display, the front has LG logo at the bottom and a front-facing camera, earpiece and sensors at the top of it. While there are no hardware navigation keys, there are four on-screen buttons in the UI – for returning to the previous screen, for returning home, for checking the recent apps and the last one for SIM transfer.
The rear panel has LG logo at the middle, speaker at the bottom and the primary camera at the top with flash. Along with it, like all models from the company, there is volume up and down key and the power key in between. The 3.5mm audio jack and the USB port is at the bottom edge
Display
The LG K10 LTE features a 5.3-inch IPS LCD display with 1280×720 pixel resolution. I was really impressed with the display quality as it offers good colour reproduction and is sharp. The brightness of the smartphone is good, one can see it under the sunlight as well as in the night comfortably.
The bezels are of good width, not too thick not too thin, and with curvy edges, it gives an impressive look to the phone.
Hardware and software
The LG K10 is powered by Qualcomm Snapdragon 410 clocked at 1.2GHz and 2GB of RAM. It has 16GB of internal memory which can be further expandable up to 32GB via a microSD card. In my view, the hardware doesn’t seem to be very powerful since the phones in this range are giving much better specifications.
However, the smartphone performs well despite of the low-power SoC. I didn’t face any type of lag while multitasking or basic navigation. Talking about the gaming performance though, it lags a lot with the high-end games like Asphalt 8, Modern Combat and Nova 3. The casual games run smoothly in it.
The Antutu and Quadrant Standard benchmarks score are 27263 and 13917 which is good in terms of given specification.
The smartphone is running on Android 5.1 Lollipop with its custom UI on the top. The UI is really smooth and I didn’t faced any type of lag in it. It does not have great customization features like MIUI or other custom skins. It has very less bloatware like LG store, LG backup, Evernote, which is a good thing.
Camera
The device has 13MP rear facing CMOS autofocus camera with LED flash and 4X Zoom. The camera took decent images but not that good when compared to the other smartphones with same camera specs. Image produce lacks the colour and intensity. The low-light performance is really bad. The given in-built camera is app is handy but it can be better with more functions as it misses out on a mode like HDR too. The autofocus is bit slow and takes time in focussing on the subject.
The front camera is of 5MP with autofocus feature. It takes decent images but here also it lacks in colour reproduction.
Battery and connectivity
Talking about the battery life, it has 2300mAh of battery, which is low in number but gives a full day backup with its customized UI. It gave me 16 hours battery life while using as a primary device, using call feature, music playback, net surfing via 4G as well as Wi-Fi.
It is a dual-SIM smartphone with 4G LTE connectivity, but it works only on SIM 1 (nano). The SIM 2 only support (3G). Only one sim works at a time and if you want to swap you have to change and restart it. Nano SIM 1 also act as a microSD card slot. The call quality is good and I didn’t find any type of call drop or other problems with it.
Gizmo Verdict
In my opinion, the LG K10 is a good smartphone with a nice design, decent hardware and battery life. But the poor camera quality and average gaming performance makes it a poor choice. We would recommend you to check out better options like the Xiaomi Redmi Note 3, LeEco Le 1s Eco, Lenovo Zuk Z1 and Meizu M3 Note.
