MWC

REPORTING FROM BARCELONA—Still dreaming of a modular phone? LG has almost created one and it's on display at #MWC16!

The LG G5 looks little like the company's previous flagship smartphones, trading in removable plastic parts for an ingenious, snap-to-open metal design. Its snap-on accessories could make it a uniquely configurable phone, but it also remains small, sleek, and appealing.

We've been seeing proposals for "modular" phones for a while now. Back in 2009 there was the Modu, while ZTE showed off a concept "Eco-Mobius" modular phone in 2014. And of course there's Project Ara, Google's repeatedly delayed modular device, which is supposed tostart testing in Puerto Rico sometime this year. (And yes, I know about the Handspring Visor, which wasn't primarily a phone.)

The LG G5 is real, though, and it pulls off the modular trick by making the bottom of the phone removable. This appears to have originally started as a way to get a removable battery into a unibody-esque metal device. Pull the bottom off; there's the battery. Then LG stuck a USB-C connection in there, and now it can offer new bottoms with new features. The first two are a camera grip with a dual-detent shutter button and 4000mAh extended battery, and a 32-bit DAC from Bang & Olufsen with its own headphone jack for super-high-quality audio.

To swap the modules, you press a button on the side, slide out the module, snap off the main battery, and snap the battery into a new module. It's pretty easy, once you get the hang of it.

This phone isn't fully modular. You can't replace the processor. But I don't see why you can't add another camera, for instance, or even an SSD. LG is opening up the spec for the G5's slot, spokesman Ken Hong said, so there will hopefully be third-party modules, too. (The company seems to be leaving an opening for third-party extended batteries, to start.)

A Sleek, Flagship Smartphone
Apart from the modular bit, the G5 is a slim and attractive smartphone, measuring 5.9 by 2.9 by 0.3 inches and weighing 5.6 ounces. That makes it narrower but slightly heavier than the LG G4, which will remain on sale.

The G5's 5.3-inch, 2,560-by-1,440 IPS LCD display is "always on," meaning that it shows time, date, and notification information all the time. LG uses a special selective backlight to light up just a little bit of the screen, saving battery (and emulating OLED screens' ability to just light up parts of themselves.) LG says the always-on display consumes less than 1 percent of battery per hour.

The power button/fingerprint scanner is still on the back—this is LG, after all—but the volume buttons have moved to the side to make the back sleeker. Above the power button, there's another surprise: dual cameras. One of them is a standard 16-megapixel unit, the other a wide-angle 8-megapixel unit with a 135-degree angle of view. You can switch between them in the camera app. The wide-angle camera definitely gives you a fish-eyed view of the world. There's also a slightly freaky camera mode that embeds the high-res, narrow-angle picture in the middle of the wide-angle picture, although the two don't quite match up.

The phone has 4GB of RAM and 32GB of storage, plus a MicroSD card slot nestled next to the SIM card slot. It runs Android 6.0 Marshmallow, but LG has interfered with the OS more than ever. In the name of "simplicity," it axed Android's app drawer, delivering a single-level experience more like Apple and Huawei. Yes, you can install another launcher, but it would be nice for these folks to stop messing with Google's experience quite so much.

I couldn't benchmark the Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 processor, but LG said that the model we were using was early pre-production software and hardware anyway. The company says the phone will be coming out in April, but didn't give a price.