G Pro for the masses?

The prevailing trend right now for manufacturers is to take their flagship phone, make it smaller, slower and slap a mini tag at the end to differentiate it from your flagship. LG has taken a slightly different route with the G Pro Lite. While the G Pro Lite does have more benign specs compared with the G Pro, LG has retained the size of the display and much of the functionality that made the original great. The only problem is that LG might have downgraded the G Pro Lite too much to properly compete with other devices in the same category.

LG G Pro Lite specs:

• 1 GHz dual-core MediaTek MT6577
• PowerVR SGX531
• 1GB RAM
• 5.5-inch IPS LCD capacitive display, 540 x 960 inches
• 8GB storage, expandable via microSD up to 32GB
• 8-megapixel camera with BSI, autofocus
• 1.3-megapixel secondary camera
• WiFi, WiFi hotspot, HSDPA
• Dual SIM, dual standby
• 3140mAh battery
• Android 4.1.2 Jelly Bean
• Php 15,990

Initial Impressions: Pretty solid so far, but limited hardware is worrying

The G Pro Lite had the same design cues as its bigger brother, the G Pro. It’s mostly constructed out of sturdy plastic, with the back cover sporting small, weaved patterns that breaks up the glossy white finish. A silver strip on the side of the device helps to arrest the boring, monotone gloss white styling. On the left side of the device lies the volume rocker with the shortcut key for the Quick Memo function of the device.

On the right side lies the power/lock button. The 3.5mm jack lies on the top of the device.

 

Turning the G Pro Lite over, you’ll see the dock for the stylus on the upper left of the device. On the bottom of the device lies the three familiar Android navigation keys plus a fourth key that allows you to access the dual-SIM menu where you can turn off or turn on a particular SIM, and turn off/on mobile data.

As far as overall use is concerned, the G Pro Lite managed to chug along fine. The G Pro Lite has LG’s custom Optimus UI layered on top Android 4.1.2, along with numerous other tweaks, which resulted in a mostly lag free experience while navigating and using the phone.

Unfortunately, even the best optimization in the world won’t mask the somewhat slow 1 GHz dual-core Mediatek MT6577 processor’s performance, which becomes obvious when we ran AnTuTu on the LG G Pro Lite. It managed to score only a measly 8481 points. We also installed Dead Trigger 2 on the device, and while it ran well in the beginning it began to noticeably drop frames whenever there were any kind of particle or blood effects on the screen, which tells us that the processor in the device was already running at its limit.

That’s it for now. Watch out for the full review of this device later this week.

The LG G Pro Lite retails for Php 15,990.