LG's G3 Beat is another cheaper, smaller Android flagship

LG's new flagship smartphone the G3 has barely touched down on shop shelves down and already a follow-up device has emerged. The LG G3 Beat, as it will be known in South Korea, or the LG S, as it will be known elsewhere, will sit a tier below the G3 proper with a lower price-tag to match.

LG is no doubt hoping that by sharing a name with the G3, the G3 S will steal a little bit of the hero handset's sunshine, but don't expect it to offer quite the same performance as its namesake. This is after all a mid-range phone.

Inside is 1.2GHz quad-core Snapdragon 400 processor, which is a significant step down from the innards of the G3 -- a phone that produced one of the most impressive benchmark scores we've ever seen. Accompanying this chipset is a measly 1GB of RAM. These lower-tier components are responsible for keeping the phone's price down, however, and will no doubt still provide a reliable and decent level of performance.

The G3 S is smaller than the G3, with a screen measuring 5 inches rather than 5.5 inches, although it still sports a pretty thin bezel meaning there's not a lot a spare handset left over. We really liked both and the feel of the G3 when we conducted our review of the handset, so if the G3 S is as similar the marketing material implies, this will be one very slick and stylish phone.

The similarities with the G3 are not only confined to the G3 S' design though -- some key features like the laser autofocus, smart keyboard, one-touch focus and shoot and gesture shot, which is great for selfies, are also present.
The camera packs an 8-megapixel sensor and its forward-facing counterpart is 1.3 megapixels. Even on a cheaper phone, these sound pretty weak these days. Most of the handset's competitors will sport at least a 5-megapixel camera on the front, and the relatively cheap Huawei Ascend P7 even offers 8 megapixels on the front -- after all this is the age of the digital self-portrait.
We thought the 3,000 mAh battery on the G3 should have been able to keep the phone juiced up for a bit longer than it actually did. As such, it's possible that the 2,540 mAh battery in the G3 S might not stretch as far as we'd like either -- although we'll reserve judgement for our full review.