The LG V10, a beast of metal and reinforced, rubberized plastic, is quite tough. How tough is it? Apparently tough enough to warrant a certification of MIL-STD-810G. This standard means that the phone was dropped up to 26 times in testing, from 4 feet or higher and onto its face, sides, corners and back and survived the whole ordeal. The testing agency, MET Lab, apparently uses plywood on top of concrete as a drop surface, claiming it mimics the most common reported surface for consumer phone drops. The phone passed rigorous function and damage checking afterward, so it’s safe to say the falls were no big deal for the tough little phablet.
This can be put down to a few factors in the build. For starters, the chassis is wrapped up tight in a bumper made of 316L metal, the kind certified by the Society of Automotive Enginers for use in modern vehicles. The top and bottom edges are left exposed, but not to worry; they’re covered in a special kind of plastic engineered for durability, same as the back cover. This special plastic, called Dura Skin, is soft to the touch and resists scratches and impacts quite nicely. They’ve made the back textured and extra-gripped using this soft-yet-durable material, so on top of a nice feel in the hand, the phone should be hard to drop although if dropped there’s a good chance it would survive. The front glass is a double-paneled setup made from Corning Gorilla Glass 4, meaning even without the other features, the glass would be tougher than most phones’ glass out there today.
The LG V10’s other features include a secondary display that functions as a sort of ticker and app drawer for now, though other uses are sure to be unveiled by LG and dreamt up by developers later on. The phone is a typical LG rounded slab, but with the design twists noted above. The 5.7-inch main display is a Quantum IPS piece sporting a resolution of 2560 x 1440, working out to 514 pixels per inch. The same PPI is maintained in the 2.1-inch secondary display. It will come with Android 5.1.1 Lollipop out of the gate, kept alive by a removable 3,000 mAh battery. 4GB of RAM and a Snapdragon 808 64-bit processor run the show. Internal storage is set at a generous 64GB, with a MicroSD slot accepting cards up to a theoretical 2TB. Being made to shoot movies, the camera setup is obviously going to be off the charts, even for LG. A 16MP rear camera with Optical Image Stabilization and a pair of wide-angle capable 5MP selfie shooters deliver on the promise with features like Manual Video.
Overall, the phone is one tough cookie, with features that stand out from the crowd. The phone will be available in its homeland of Korea this month, with international releases soon to follow. In the U.S., it’s expected to hit every major carrier except Sprint with flagship pricing in tow.