There is no shred of doubt that the LG K10 LTE is a well-designed smartphone, however, one might be critical about the hardware specs the phablet packs. Still, the device comes at such a decent price that any complaint would sound demeaning (pun intended) to the South Korean company’s offer.
When looking at the design and pricing of the LG K10 LTE, you will find it hard to accept the bang you will be in for as far as your buck is concerned. This mid-tier phone has a premium look and you will also find it easy to differentiate it from the cheaper LG K7.
According to LG, the K in the LG K10 (and LG K7) stands for Kinetic. With the pricing of the phone and the convincing looks, it is possible that the company had youths in its mind when coming in with this mid-range phone. One thing you need to know is that the two phones are products of LG’s India plant and they’ll be the first to feature the “Made in India” tag.
The LG K10 LTE went for a 2.5D curved glass as far as its front-facing panel is concerned while the rear features the company’s pebble design. If you are familiar with LG devices, you will be quick to notice that the volume rockers and power button are located at the back, just underneath the snapper. The textured back and curved glass front sandwich a metal frame that runs along the sides and takes a rounded shape on the edges to give the phone a stylish appearance. These ensure that the grip you get is firm, meaning that the 5.3-inch device won’t easily slip out of your hand.
The screen comes with an HD resolution and vivid colors, however, you might find a hard time using the device in bright sunlight.
As for the processing power, the LG K10 LTE packs a rather inferior Snapdragon 410 SoC that features four cores and is supported by a RAM of 2GB. While the phone comes with a decent camera of 13MP on the rear and 5MP for selfies, you will only have 16GB of onboard storage to store your photos and videos, among other media files. Given its market target, the K10 LTE has two SIM card slots with 4G enabled as well as support for VoLTE. The 2300mAh battery unit should be enough to keep you through a larger part of the day with moderate usage, or even a full day.
The worst part of the story, probably, is that the LG K10 LTE is powered by Android 5.0 Lollipop out of the box. This is somehow a letdown to the LG family out there dreaming of an affordable, premium-looking device powered by the latest Android 6.0 Marshmallow.
Although priced at about $200, the LG K10 will find it hard to impress mid-range buyers when the likes of Xiaomi, Huawei, LeEco and many others are in the market for similarly affordable devices, but with much more to offer, including fingerprint support, better cameras, more RAM as well as faster processors, just to mention but few.