LG G3 review: Dream catcher

Standard gallery

The Gallery stacks photos and videos together in albums, which can be organized by the date they were taken or the source they come from. Location-based sorting is also available, or you can have the Gallery display just your Videos - especially useful as the G3 doesn't come with a dedicated Video player app.

As usual, there is an array of available options at your disposal. You can share, highlight, and delete images, as well as set them as backgrounds, assign them to contacts, add them to a specific album, or print them.

Editing images takes you to Google's Photos app, used in lieu of a picture editor from LG.

Gallery • Image editing is done through Google Photos

The gallery supports viewing your images in their full resolution. You can easily pinch-zoom to 1:1 magnification.

Capable Video player with a ton of features

The video player on the LG G3 has a rather simple yet powerful interface. There isn't a dedicated app - you just pick a video from the gallery or the file manager.

You get Play/Pause, fast-forward, and rewind buttons, in addition to a slider to scrub through the video. The slider gives you a nifty animated preview thumbnail while at it. All of these hide automatically after a few seconds of playback.

The video player has excellent subtitle support

The G3 played almost every file we threw at it, regardless of file format, resolution, or audio/video codec. There were even a few QHD samples thrown in by LG to take advantage of the high screen resolution. The only files that didn't play were our MOV samples, but those are usually a no-go for droids out-of-box.

Great music player

LG's music player features a similar layout as the one in the previous Android versions. Your music library is organized by various categories, with the Album view being the most interesting thanks to its large album thumbnails.

The Now playing screen will display the Album art and playback controls, which you can swipe to the sides for the next/previous track.

Music player with equalizer settings

There's a robust equalizer on board, complete with a wide variety of presets. You can also adjust the playback pitch and speed.

When playing a song, playback controls will appear in the notification center and lockscreen, although on the latter the album art is rather unpleasantly stretched.

Playback controls on the notification area and lockscreen

Amazingly clean audio output

The LG G3 results in the first part of our audio quality test are nothing short of amazing. The smartphone produced the best numbers we've ever seen including a perfect -100 on the stereo crosstalk score. Sadly, the volume levels weren't quite up with the best so we can't really crown the G3 as the unequivocally best out there, but it will be for those that value cleanness above loudness.

Plugging in a pair of headphones tells a similar story - the output is almost perfectly clean (the stereo crosstalk reading while excellent on its own, is no longer the best we've seen), while the volume levels are slightly below average. The volume is still higher than on the Xperia Z2, for example, so the overall performance is still among the best even for flagships.

Test	Frequency response	Noise level	Dynamic range	THD	IMD + Noise	Stereo crosstalk
LG G3	+0.02, -0.08	-99.4	98.9	0.0016	0.035	-100.0
LG G3 (headphones attached)	+0.02, -0.09	-93.7	93.3	0.0060	0.032	-78.5
Sony Xperia Z2	+0.02, -0.08	-88.2	90.1	0.0063	0.013	-88.9
Sony Xperia Z2 (headphones attached)	+0.08, -0.04	-84.7	87.6	0.120	0.066	-60.2
Samsung Galaxy S5	+0.02, -0.08	-96.3	93.3	0.0017	0.0089	-95.2
Samsung Galaxy S5 (headphones)	+0.01, -0.08	-96.3	93.3	0.0095	0.018	-61.9
HTC One (M8)	+0.04, -0.10	-95.4	93.4	0.0012	0.010	-93.2
HTC One (M8) (headphones)	+0.04, -0.08	-94.9	93.9	0.0014	0.018	-79.7
LG G2	+0.03, -0.28	-91.9	91.9	0.0097	0.011	-91.3
LG G2 (headphones)	+0.07, -0.03	-91.5	91.8	0.037	0.041	-54.3
Oppo Find 7a	+0.03, -0.16	-92.7	92.6	0.0057	0.072	-92.0
Oppo Find 7a (headphones)	+0.05, -0.07	-91.5	92.7	0.0042	0.054	-15.7

LG G3 frequency response

You can learn more about the tested parameters and the whole testing process here.