LG F70 hands-on: 4G LTE on the cheap

Even though LG announced the majority of its new Android smartphones days before MWC 2014 even started, the Korean company has two more phones up its sleeve and the first one aims to bring 4G LTE on the cheap.

It’s the LG F70 and being affordable is its biggest trump card. The 4.5” handset features the latest Android 4.4 KitKat and packs some of LG’s software magic, plus it includes a quad-core 1.2GHz processor and a 5MP rear camera. To drive the point about always-on connectivity, the phone also sports a 2440 mAh removable battery for a full day off the charger.

We spotted the F70 on the showroom floor and took it for a hands-on spin - take a look.

Design

The LG F70 is not a phone that is best described as ‘ordinary’ or ‘generic’. It simply does not stand out in any way in terms of design. It’s got a plastic with a dot pattern on its back, and it’s keys are comfortable to press, plus it’s compact and easy to use with a single hand. What’s more to want from a cheap-o phone?

Display

The F70 sports a 4.5-inch display with a resolution of 480 x 800 pixels (WVGA), and the thought of Moto G’s equally large screen inevitably surfaces. The Moto G has got a 720p display, though, so we do hope that the F70 will be cheaper to compensate for that. For what we can tell, the display on the F70 is fairly bright and vivid, so while it’s not anything spectacular, it’s not poor either.

Interface and functionality

Getting the latest Android 4.4 KitKat on an affordable device like the F70 is something we’ve long been dreaming of, and it seems that dreams are coming true at MWC this year. The F70 indeed rocks the latest version of Android with LG’s custom Optimus skin on top. The skin is cartoony and cheerful, with nice animations, and LG even brings some of its premium features to this handset like the Knock Code screenlock.

Processor and memory

The F70 model name sounds almost like ‘F50 Ferrari’, and funnily enough the LG handset has a lot of raw power under the hood (maybe not as much as a Ferrari, though). It’s all relative to its class, of course, and we’re looking at a 1.2GHz quad-core Snapdragon 400, the same chip that’s powering the Moto G.

Good news is that the F70 ran super smooth in our short time with it and it handled even more intense apps with ease. The F70 might be affordable, but it should run the latest and most demanding games since it has very few pixels to push with that 480 x 800 resolution. If you don’t care that much about sharpness, it would be a great compact handset for gaming.

The scarce 4GB of internal storage is a bit of a disappointment, but you get a microSD expansion card slot.

Camera

The LG F70 sports both a rear and a front facing camera, which is good. The main one on its back is a 5-megapixel auto-focus unit with LED flash, while the front facing one is a basic VGA shooter. We don’t expect any revolutions in its photographic capabilities, nor any huge disappointments, but for actual camera samples we’d have to wait a bit longer.

Expectations

The LG F70 is an affordable device with surprising amount of power under the hood. The quad-core Snapdragon 400 that’s powering it puts it in the same league as the Moto G, and if LG prices it right (we still don’t know the retail price), it could be a winner.