LG V10 review: Screen play

Gallery needs RAW editing

The LG V10 brings a capable Gallery app, which compliments its serious camera department. The Memories feature automatically organizes photos by location and time, or you can view the images by Album or as a Timeline (by Day, Moth, Year and with pinch zoom to help you navigate).

DLNA is built into the app, so you can send photos to a compatible TV or pull them from a storage device or computer.

Then there's the cloud connectivity - Google Drive, Dropbox, Box, OneDrive and T cloud are supported, though not Facebook or Flickr.

The gallery easily integrates with DLNA and cloud photo sources

For photo editing you get an Auto enhance button, basic color correction and cropping. Photos you shot in RAW format will get a DNG icon, unfortunately there are no advanced tools to edit those files on the phone itself, so you'll have to resort to your desktop computer for those or get a separate app from the Play store.

Basic photo editing options, nothing for RAW files

Video editing got more love, the Auto edit feature can take an unwieldly 16 minute/2GB video and trim it down to the 15 most exciting seconds. It will recognize people's faces and keep those parts of the footage, while discarding duplicate or blurry shots.

Video editing options.

You can do manual video editing too. Predefined styles quickly add background music and a color theme or you can select those manually. Also, you can slow down or speed up parts of the video to create a dramatic effect.

Music player

Like the gallery, the music player features DLNA and cloud integration making it easy to sync your music collection. And the LG V10 will take anything you throw at it - lossless FLAC and ALAC files as well as MP3s.

Now, MP3 offers lower quality than the lossless formats, but LG's software and 32-bit Hi-Fi DAC from ESS Technology promises to upsample your 16-bit/44.1kHz files to 24-bit/192kHz. This works for streaming audio too (which is usually worse than offline MP3s). Keep in mind this is more of a placebo effect - upsampling raises the bitrate but there's no way for it to add extra data and thus improve the quality. If you do have high-quality tracks the V10 will play them trouble-free though.

The music player features a Hi-Fi DAC that you enable from the notification area

Have you ever been annoyed at your music player because you can't get the volume right? You'll feel like Goldilocks with the V10, which offers 75 levels of volume so you can find one that's just right.

The app comes with a number of equalizer presets, including one dedicated to the Quad Beats headset you receive in the retail box. Hitting the Custom option gives you a manual 7-band equalizer to play with.

The first time you plug in a pair of headphones, the phone will tell you about the 32-bit DAC. Enabling it gives you the precise volume control as well as dials to change the left/right balance.

The LG V10 has built-in FM radio, though in some regions it has been disabled (it's not available on our unit, for example), so be sure to double-check.

Video player

There's no dedicated video player on the LG V10, you have to go through the gallery. The good news is that its DLNA capabilities come in handy if you have your videos stored on a compatible device. You can also manually load subtitles and customize their look (size and style).

The video player supports subtitles and QSlide

The Qslide shortcut moves the video into a small, floating window so you can keep watching as you use the phone. It's a handy way to reply to a message without hitting pause or keeping music videos going.

Audio output is nicely clean, but not very loud

The LG V10 produced perfectly clear output when connected to an active external amplifier - there wasn't a single one of its readings to be anything other than excellent. The volume wasn't particularly impressive, but it was still just above average so we certainly liked what we saw here.

Plug in a pair of headphones and you get some extra stereo crosstalk and a bit of intermodulation distortion. Both readings remain very good for the case though so the overall clarity is rather pleasing. Volume levels do drop a bit though and that means the V10 wouldn't be particularly comfortable handling high-impedance headphones. Those aside however, the LG flagship did a very good job here.

LG V10 frequency response

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