A watered-down flagship phone that’s too expensive for its specs

The LG G2 seriously impressed the whole CNET team with its brilliant screen, its lightning fast processor and its great camera. As nearly all of its rivals have done, LG has paired its flagship with a smaller version, for those not willing to shove a 5.2-inch phone into their jeans.

The G2 Mini, as it’s known, has a 4.7-inch display, with a 960×540-pixel resolution, a 1.2GHz quad-core processor and an 8-megapixel camera. The eagle-eyed may have noticed that that’s a big step down in every respect from what the standard G2 has to offer. Just as Samsung did with its Galaxy S4 Mini, LG has taken the name from its flagship phone and simply applied it to a far more basic piece of kit.

Mercifully, it is quite a bit cheaper than the G2. You can pick the Mini up now for £235, SIM-free from unlocked-mobiles.com (who provided our review sample). With specs comparable to the superb Motorola Moto G but at more than double the cost, does the addition of 4G and a higher resolution camera justify the extra expense?

Design and build quality

It’s a ridiculous world when a 4.7-inch phone can carry the moniker “mini”, but I suppose it is at least marginally smaller than the regular G2, which houses a 5.2-inch display. The slight reduction in size does make the phone a little easier to hold and type on with one hand. It measures 66mm wide and 130mm long — almost identical dimensions to the Moto G, even though the Moto G has a smaller 4.5-inch display.

The G2 Mini has squeezed in a larger display by keeping the bezel narrow. This has the secondary effect of making the phone look slightly more luxurious, as budget phones often have enormous plastic bezels around their displays. It does need the image boost a little, as around the back things aren’t quite as slick.

The back panel is entirely plastic, immediately making it feel much less premium than the glass-backed Sony Xperia Z1 Compact (although to be fair, the Z1 Compact is more expensive). It’s not helped by the scratchy texture, which is similar to designs I’ve seen on various low-end budget phones. I certainly prefer the matte, rubberised feel of the Moto G.

On the plus side, the removable panel means you can swap out the battery and there’s a slot for a microSD card too. You’ll need to use an external card as you’ll blow through the 8GB of built-in storage pretty quickly once you start downloading big apps and saving your music locally.

Like its big brother, the G2 Mini has its power and volume keys on the back of the phone beneath the camera lens, rather than on the side. Sounds daft, but LG’s reasoning is sound enough — the buttons sit exactly where your index finger naturally falls when you’re holding the phone. That’s the theory anyway, but in practice, I’m not sold. I found it took a lot of getting used to and even after a few days with the phone, I kept naturally looking to the sides for the power button. I imagine that after weeks of using it you may eventually get used to it and appreciate the location, but I feel LG is attempting to fix a problem that really doesn’t exist to begin with.

Display

The G2 Mini’s 4.7-inch display boasts a 960×540-pixel resolution, which results in a disappointingly low pixel density of 234 pixels per inch. I’m baffled as to why LG hasn’t whacked in a higher-resolution panel, particularly when you consider that the Moto G’s physically smaller, 1,280×720-pixel display has a 326pppi resolution and costs less than half.

Full HD is probably a bit of a stretch for a mid-range phone — the 4.7-inch HTC One had a Full HD screen, but came with a very high price tag — I’d expect at least a 720p screen for the money though.

The low resolution results in a display that lacks the pin-sharp clarity of its larger sibling or indeed the Moto G. It’s far from blurry — it’s perfectly adequate for Tweeting, prowling Facebook or Googling your own name — but it doesn’t have the crispness around icon edges or in text that you’d get from a higher resolution display.

It is at least quite bright, which makes it fairly easy to read under harsh office lights and, in my experience, an unusually sunny London sky. Colours are vivid too, which helps make Netflix shows and YouTube clips look decent, despite the unimpressive resolution.

Android software

The G2 Mini arrives with the latest version of Android on board, known as 4.4.2 KitKat. It’s good to see the latest software available at launch, particularly given the regular G2 is still running the older Jelly Bean. With KitKat, you can take advantage of features such as full-screen media and games (with no navigation buttons taking up screen space) and the ability to search for local businesses from your contacts list.

LG has heavily skinned the Android interface, as it did with the G2. Although the core structure of multiple homescreens for apps and widgets and an app tray for other apps remains, LG has its own fonts, colour schemes and even app icons. You can also change the order of the navigation buttons if you’re used to having them in a different order from other manufacturer’s phones.

LG has also thrown in a feature to quickly take a screenshot and then write notes over the top by tapping an icon in the pull-down notification bar. It’s hardly ground-breaking, but it’s handy for scrawling notes on a Google Maps screen to send to someone trying to find your flat. Finally, as with the G2, you can wake the phone up on standby mode by double-tapping the screen — which you’ll need to do when it’s lying flat, covering the power button.

Processor and power