LG Optimus L5 II review

Towards the lower end of LG's Optimus range, the L5 II steps up some important specs from last year's L5 and aims to deliver quality smartphone features at a budget price.

It's on sale now for around £115. 

Design
From the front, the L5 II is standard smartphone glossy black with a single hard home button flanked by touch-sensitive back and menu buttons. But that home button is surrounded by LED lighting that glows in different colours depending on function -- blue for calendar alerts, green for alerts etc. There's also a programmable function button on the side and while the rear casing looks like classy brushed aluminium it's actually very thin and lightweight plastic -- still, if you don't tell anyone...

The four-inch touchscreen screen offers a resolution of 800x480 pixels, which boils down to 233 pixels per inch -- a far cry from the retina-popping delights of the HD high-end, but it still manages to look bright and vibrant, and much better than the original L5's 320x480-pixel resolution, even if it's not quite as sharp as the best.

Features and performance
It's running Android 4.1.2 Jelly Bean, so one step behind the very latest 4.2 edition, which is what we'd expect at this price. Beyond a light skim over the icon design and some basic transition animations, LG seems to have left Google's OS more or less alone with no unique widgets available, though there is a Polaris Viewer on board for looking at (but not creating or editing) Word and Excel docs.

Interestingly, LG has also added Safety Care, an app designed for the vulnerable or elderly, which sends out alert texts if you call an emergency number and can be set to send out an alert if the phone hasn't been used during a set period.
The original L5's 800MHz processor has been bumped up to 1GHz with an attendant increase in speed, though it still tends to typically experience a brief delay when opening apps and busy web pages can take a little longer to process than feels comfortable. Our AnTuTu performance benchmark test delivered a score of 4,936, which puts it a little ahead of the Samsung Young and Fame -- it's not exceptional, but it won't embarrass you with its tardiness either.

Photography
The five-megapixel camera includes autofocus and an LED flash, plus a few extras like voice control -- you can take a picture by saying "Cheese, "Smile", "Whiskey", "LG" or "Kimchi". And why not? Unfortunately, picture quality isn't really up to the mark, with washed-out colours, all too frequent blur and a paucity of detail. It will record VGA quality video at 30fps but unfortunately there's no front-facing camera for video calls, which seems like a trick missed.

More worryingly, there's less than 2GB of memory available for storing your apps so you'll almost certainly need a microSD card for your tunes and vids which may or may not be provided by the network you buy the phone from (LG doesn't include one as standard). You can't store apps on the memory card though, so if you like to have lots of apps, this isn't the phone for you.
The battery life held up pretty well though, coming close to two full days of busy use.

Conclusion
The LG Optimus L5 isn't going to set any records, or help LG to distinguish itself among the smartphone glut. It's a shame, because it's a decently solid smartphone at a competitive price.