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Chrysalis:
I decided to return the device to EE, on paper its good, better cpu, gpu, ram, faster flash storage, usb-c, fm radio, and better speaker position.

However sadly in practice I have issues to overcome, which only some I have mitigated.

Some examples.

Battery drain is on average about 2-3x more than my samsung, with always on display disabled and about 6x worse with it enabled.

Developer support for custom roms/kernels is very lacking, I made the same mistake as when I got my S5, I didnt check how active the section is on XDA first, I just assumed it would be as lots of people on there said they were getting G5's but is no working custom kernels (very important for efficient performance and battery) and minimal rom's.

The IPS screen annoys me more then I expected, The IPS on my oneplusone is actually better than the one on the G5, the backlight bleed (poor blacks) and poor viewing angles keep annoying me, I have been spoilt by amoled.

The dialer has no auto redial, this to me seems a no brainer, am baffled why its not on the lg phones, but is missing, I did find an app which supposedly adds the function but it didnt work.  Its very useful to me e.g. when trying to get a GP appointment when its war on the phones when the GP opens to get an appointment.

Contact pictures during calls are very small, g4 tweaker allows it to be made bigger but then is covered by bad placement of the contact name and number.

Performance is not as expected, there is a few issues here.  First for some reason for reasons I cannot understand the phone runs slower when my sim is inserted.  A lot of tuning on the cpu governor in kernel auditor I had improved chompsms performance to very close to what it is on my s5 but other software remain laggier, even tho the cpu itself benches over 2x faster than whats in the s5.  I also noticed bugs in the cpu governor behaviour, cores dont park, sometimes I see parked cores but they get stuck parked when it happens and phone lags like crazy when it occurs, lots of stuttering on scrolling etc.  I expect the zzmoove governor would fix it as to be fair my s5 took a lot of tweaking and a custom kernel to get smooth, but the g5 lacks a custom kernel with that governor added so it is what it is.  On raw numbers the flash memory is about 8x faster than my s5, cpu about 2.2x faster per core (however across all cores the gap drops to only a 20% margin).    The gpu is way better but I dont really game on my phone.

So those are the issues, some I could probably accept and get used to, but I feel a couple of them to me are major issues and with all of them combined it overall would seem a step backwards.  Is a shame as usb-c is definitely a step forward, connecting the cable is way better than old microusb, the fast charging is very nice, and the clock always been on is also a nice touch, which of course goes back to amoled situation, the always on display would clearly be better with amoled as amoled doesnt need to power black pixels and in addition the better contrast ratio and viewing angles would make the clock so much clearer, on the g5 I have to pick up the device to get a good viewing angle as otherwise the clock is hard to see with the contrast shift off angle.

So where do I go from here?

I will keep using the s5 for the immediate future, it works, the main issue I have is its multitasking as 2 gig of ram is not enough to keep apps loaded in the background.  The g5 definitely was nice that background apps kept their state when returning to them.

Upgrading to the s7 is out of the question at the moment, its overpriced, and also I am not a fan of non removable batteries.  I may consider it after the s8 is launched as the price will drop then, I will this time check to see what kernels are available before getting the device, and sadly the s7 also has only the legacy microusb.

Another note is that on paper the wifi spec of both phones is on par, but the s5 901f has dual spatial streams so the AC is 866mbit, whilst the g5 is single stream so the AC is 433mbit.

The initial great battery life was a one off sadly.

Of course if I dont manage to relock the bootloader, then EE probably would reject the return, so returning it is subject to me managing to do that.

Chrysalis:
I have swung again :D

I have fixed the battery drain and performance for most part, the only big issue I usee left is a lack of auto redialling when engaged and I have a android dev working on that for me as I type.

The recent pics I took of my pfsense box which I posted today surprised me, this phone has a much better camera for indoor use than my S5.

Chrysalis:
The G5 was returned and I now have a S7 (non edge model), its definitely faster than the G5.  Its AOD drains faster than the G5 tho. With AOD off its drain is comparable to the S5.

I will keep AOD on when at home as I am always near a charger, but when out will turn it off.

Officially the S7 has no MHL, but I noticed in the kernel there is MHL drivers, so will test it out at some point but if doesnt work I will just use my S5 (which I decided to not sell now) to put F1 live timing on my second monitor when watching F1.  (I use MHL to get live timing app on a big screen).

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