LG Optimus L5 II Reviews

The LG Optimus L5 II is a remarkably compact and lightweight smartphone. It has a 4in, 480 x 800-resolution screen, measures a mere 9.7mm at its thickest point, and at 103g you'll barely notice it in your pocket.

The price is reasonable, too, at only £110, and in many ways it's perfectly competent. It has a bright, clear IPS display, which delivered a maximum brightness of 420cd/m2 – not far off the Motorola Moto G's 436cd/m2 – and once Android has settled down after initial setup, the UI feels responsive.

While it doesn't run pure Android, we rather like LG's adaptation of it. It isn't particularly overbearing, despite a rather cutesy look, and we like the quick-settings menu, which lets you access settings such as flight mode, sync and Wi-Fi directly from the notifications pull-down menu.

Performance
Performance isn't so hot. The L5 II is powered by a basic single-core processor – a 1GHz MediaTek MT6575 – and as soon as you start asking it to do anything demanding, such as playing games and multitasking, it begins to struggle.

Unsurprisingly, the L5 II racked up a disappointing set of results in our benchmarks. It struggled through the GFXBench T-Rex benchmark with an average framerate of 0.4fps, and it took its time to complete the Sunspider browser benchmark, too, finishing with a result of 1,576ms. It's amongst the slowest performing phones we've tested in recent times.

The camera was just as bad, producing over-compressed and heavily smeared images in both low light and good, and terribly noisy 640 x 480 resolution video.

Battery life is the L5 II's best quality. In video playback, it consumed a reasonable 17.4% per hour. The gaming test drained a mere 10% per hour, and 3G streaming cost it 8.4% per hour. Its overall average of 12% per hour is very competitive.