LG Stylo 6 Review: An Affordable Stylus Phone

LG Stylo 6 There is a sub- $ 300 phone with built-in stylus, which puts it in the exclusive company: the $ 299 Motorola Moto G stylus is more or less its only competition. For its $ 270 price, the Stylo 6 offers good battery performance; A large, bright screen; And easy pen-derived features that provide stylus life. But as much fun as I enjoyed doodling on my generously sized screen, it’s just too slow to recommend.

It’s a shame because I really enjoyed the aspects of using this phone. I was able to reduce the battery by no less than 30 percent on a day of heavy use, and I drew my soulmate accurately, creating an animated doodle of a farting butt and experienced real joy. The photos look good on its vivid, wide 6.8-inch screen, and I was pleasantly surprised to find it again and again Chernobyl (Don’t worry, I talk to my doctor about this) that it has stereo speakers.

Unfortunately, that joy was additionally defeated every time the phone switched between apps, opened Twitter, loaded my Instagram feed, or started my Google Maps navigation. It is not unusually slow, but it is quite slow. If you have the patience of a small insect like me, there is a fine line between the two.

LG Stylo 6 screen and display

The Stylo 6 is a big phone, as you would expect a phone with a stylus. It offers a 6.8-inch 1080p LCD with a standard 60Hz refresh rate and modest bezels. Its dimensions are similar to the Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra, also a larger phone, except that it is slightly taller. The screen itself is very bright and bright, and the aforementioned stereo speakers watch videos that are slightly nicer.

I found the phone to be too large to use one-handed overall, and it also felt awkward in a large coat pocket. Next to this point, though, if you’re considering the Stylo, you probably already know that you want a big phone, so each for their own good.

The Stylo 6 has a Mediatek Helio P35 chipset and 3GB of RAM. Meanwhile the Stylo 6 has its troubles: This processor and RAM combination does not provide enough power for this phone. I often stumbled across Twitter and Instagram strolling through the media-rich screen. Opening and switching between apps, as mentioned earlier in Ditto, and the camera also suffers from laggy processing speed.

I occasionally tapped the screen, then wondered if the phone had separated the tap before opening the app or whatever I was trying to do. Conversely, I tap the screen very lightly or quickly and wait an extra second before finding out that it was not registered, just because I gave the phone a little extra time to do everything. Had made a habit of giving. All of this would be more forgivable on a $ 200 phone (if still frustrating), but depending on where you get the Stylo 6, it’s approaching $ 300 and should actually do better.

If the phone has a bright spot for processing wipes, it is that battery life is great – possibly as a side effect. The Stylo 6 has a 4,000mAh battery, and after a typical day with two days of screen-on time, I was usually down to only 70 percent. I was sure that one day of heavy usage with Google Maps navigation, Spotify, and more social media scrolling than usual would challenge it, but no. I also did not do enough for a low battery warning before plugging it in at night.

Just one configuration has been offered with built in 64 GB of storage, which is not great, but it is expandable via microSD. It ships with Android 10 and unfortunately, a lot of preloaded applications and games that you might not want. LG is not known for a generous upgrade program, so it is highly unlikely that the Stylo 6 will see the Android 11 update.

LG Stylo 6 Stylus Features

Of course, stylus features are a big draw here. The stylus is moved away and spring-loaded to the lower-right corner of the device, and when removed it activates a set of shortcuts. You can take a quick note, grab a screenshot or GIF on your screen, and mark it with a note, or make your partner do something immature for the text.

Despite Samsung’s Galaxy Note being a truly stylus phone, LG has been making phones with styluses for ages, and it shows up with a little UI touch like you toggle gesture navigation when starting a note so that you make a mistake Do not swipe it with. . You won’t find advanced features like the (much more expensive) Galaxy Note series here such as the ability to use handwriting-to-text conversion or stylus as a remote control. Basically, it does everything you expect it to do, and these features work well.

I was surprised at how much I enjoyed having the stylus available. It is very easy to draw or write silly notes on images with a pen instead of your finger, which I originally gave up on doing because they look so terrible.

The ability to summarize a quick note without turning on the screen is also something that I really appreciated. I feel like I’m always opening a new note to unlock my phone, find the notes app, and type something quickly like an email address or song title. It is nonexistent compared to the Galaxy Note, but the Stylo 6 has a set of really useful features that are not very common, especially at this price point.

LG Stylo 6 Camera

The Stylo includes a 13-megapixel main camera, a 5-megapixel ultravide, a 5-megapixel depth sensor, and a 13-megapixel selfie camera. It’s not much resolution to work with, but enough to allow the Stylo to take decent-quality images in good light.

The white balance sometimes becomes slightly too magenta or too green, which sometimes gives me an effect – a melancholy film-like quality. At other times, the images looked very calm and washed out. I like how Stylo handles high-contrast scenes; The HDR effect does not look very strong. Your preview image will look excessively dark, but an HDR icon on the screen indicates that the final image will look much more balanced.

Images in low light or medium indoor lighting look fine for social media, but if you look closely show a lot of blunt detail. The ultraviolet lens is somewhat limited by its low-race sensor. Even bright daylight shots look more smooth in details, and it’s not just for low light photography.

The camera also succumbs to the phone’s low-power processor, especially in portrait mode. The live preview is quite sluggish, which deteriorates after pushing the shutter and wait for the phone to process the image. This may take up to six seconds, during which you are unable to take another image.

It is hard to know if you have found the right frame of your subject, and it is a frustrating experience that you are trying to get photographed on a subject that is growing a bit just because you are not “spray and praying” Can.” The camera keeps the shutter speed relatively low, therefore, there may be a blur subject issue. By sheer luck I got a picture mode photo of my cat mid-yawn, but I wouldn’t be able to do it again.

I have captured some images with Stylo that I really like, but I felt like it was more in spite of the camera instead. The photos this phone captures will look fine on Instagram and Facebook, but overall, Stylo’s camera capabilities lag behind most other devices at this price.

The Stylo 6 has some good things for it: an affordable price, built-in stylus, big screen and great battery life. But factoring in its drawbacks, a low-power processor, it is not a device that I can easily recommend.

Even around its $ 270 price, there are many other more capable options. The $ 300 OnePlus Nord N10 5G offers a better camera and processor. The 2021 Motorola Moto G Power includes a massive battery and improved processor performance for $ 200. Neither of them comes with a stylus, but I don’t think the Stylo 6 is your best bet for an inexpensive phone with a stylus: just for a bit more, the 2021 Moto G stylus improves performance and upgrades Is the camera.

If speed is not a concern, then a stylus should be, and the price is right, I think you can live a very happy life with this phone. Perhaps my patience is too thin right now, and a more enlightened person can coexist peacefully with it. The rest of us will try our best to look elsewhere.

Photography by Allison Johnson / The Reporter Door