LG AKA review: Eye contact

Telephony and messaging

The phonebook in Android 4.4 KitKat is a standard affair. It's quite straightforward and easy to navigate, with a dedicated tab for your favorite contacts for quick access. There's plenty of contact information you can assign to each contact and it still remains neatly organized.

The dialer is part of the phonebook and supports smart dialing.

The phonebook • the dialer

The LG AKA has high in-call volume and there are also native video calls available right in the phone app. Smart Dial also works like a charm and searches both names and numbers.

The LG AKA scored a Good mark on our loudspeaker tests, meaning you'll hardly miss any calls and notifications. The loudspeaker sound quality isn't very good though, but it will do for occasional videos and songs.

LG Keyboard handles the text input - it supports various languages, it has a top numeric row and you can configure the keys height and the bottom row shortcuts.

Additional input methods include Google's voice input and handwriting support for multiple (downloadable) languages.

Configuring the LG Keyboard

Multimedia

The Gallery on the LG AKA is quite similar to what you get on most Android devices, including a resizable list of thumbnails. Rather than having an in-house editing suite like Samsung droids, for instance, the LG AKA relies on Google Photos to handle image editing. It features a variety of neat filter effects and the standard options like crop, rotate, and color balance, but doesn't let you write or stamp on an image.

The image gallery • Editing options

There is no default Video app - all video files pile up in the Gallery's Video tab. Besides being able to choose between three crop modes for how the video fits the screen, you can also adjust the playback speed anywhere between 0.5-1.5x.

The video player supports subtitles

The codec support is good, but not great - the default player supports MP4, H264 (MKV) and XviD, but lacks DivX and WMV. Strangely, the MOV containers aren't supported either, while the lack of AC3 audio means the MKV compatibility is pointless. On a positive note even non-Latin subtitles are supported.

You can play a video in a pop-up, visible while you interact with other apps, thanks to the Q-Slide option.

LG AKA's Music app is jam-packed with features and supports a wide variety of file formats, including .FLAC, and .WAV among others. It also supports cloud accounts as Dropbox and Box. LG has enabled equalizer presets (including a custom one with 7 bands) and even has the ability to adjust the pitch and speed of a given track during playback.

Music player app • music options and equalizer

Very good audio output

The LG AKA performed very well in the active external amplifier part of our traditional audio quality test, posting great scores all over the field. Its volume levels were below average, putting a minus next to that A mark.

There's some degradation when you plug in a pair of headphones, but it is limited to a moderate bump in stereo crosstalk, leaving the overall clarity great. Loudness fails to impress once again though, suggesting you better stick to less demanding headsets.

And here go the results so you can see for yourselves.

LG AKA frequency response

You can learn more about the whole testing process here.

Web browser and other apps

The LG AKA comes with its own version of the stock Android browser, as well as Google's Chrome browser.

The stock browser packs the usual features: Incognito tabs, Bookmarks, Find in page and Desktop view. There is no Flash support. Pages can be saved locally to read offline, but videos cannot. Reader view is available, too.

The stock web browser

QMemo+ features a plethora of features, including the ability to add location and weather info to your notes, draw and add text to nearly any type of screenshot or picture, as well as share and save your notes via a wide range of media.

QMemo+

The usual organizing tools are present as well - there is a Calendar, a Calculator, Tasks, Voice Recorder and Weather apps. A proper File Manager app is pre-installed too.

Calendar • Tasks • Calculator • File Manager

There is no full blown office package, but you can open office files, including PDFs, thanks to the ThinkViewer app. If you need an edit option, you'll have to find another solution from the Play Store.

ThinkViewer