![]() The G4 also has a customizable notification LED, though its options are fairly limited. The third screenshot above shows Lollipop’s sound and notifications settings that give you granular control over how applications get your attention. A nice touch is that if you have a lot of notifications, you can swipe up, hiding the quick settings and showing more notifications. You can also toggle the brightness and volume controls on or off, which shrinks the size of the panel significantly. There are twenty-two rearrangeable settings buttons to choose from, with fourteen selected by default. The G4 uses the standard Android Lollipop notifications, but the pull-down notification panel is very much in line with what's found on previous LG phones, including the horizontally scrolling array of circular shortcuts to toggle different settings, a screen brightness slider, and a volume slider. LG adds a button that drops the notification panel down, a QuickMemo button that takes a screenshot you can markup, a button to quickly open one of the QSlide mini-apps, and a button to quickly access the Dual-window split screen mode. You can add up to two additional buttons to the standard Android home, back, and multitasking trio. ![]() The screenshot on the right shows the customization options for the onscreen buttons. One nice touch to the Smart Notice widget is that its background color automatically changes to compliment your wallpaper choice. It also suggests-somewhat ironically-uninstalling apps that have not been used for awhile, notifies you when a particular app is excessively draining the battery, and shows general help tips. Most often this ends up being something weather related, but new contact suggestions, callback reminders, and birthday reminders also appear. This widget shows you the time, date, and weather but also has an area below with additional contextual information. In the middle is LG’s Smart Notice widget found on the home screen. On the left, doing a swipe-down-and-hold motion with the screen off pulls down a tab that shows the time, date, battery level, and any notifications you may have. The series of screenshots above show a few more of the G4’s unique software features. If you want to go this route, you have to ditch LG’s launcher entirely and install the Google Now Launcher from the Play Store. Although it is easy to switch off in the home screen settings, it would be nice if it could be replaced by something else, like Google Now. It duplicated information and functionality easily available in other parts of the phone, and in all the time we used the G4, we cannot say we used it once. An Evernote widget is also available if you have the application installed.Īlthough Smart Bulletin is an attractive and well-designed application, we did find its usefulness pretty redundant. There’s also Quick Remote, which is LG’s universal remote application that utilizes the G4’s IR blaster, and Smart Tips, which is the G4’s help app. The defaults are Calendar, which simply shows upcoming events (as in the right-hand screenshot) LG Health, which is not shown above since the app is not installed on this phone Music and Smart Settings (shown in the middle screen shot). The widgets can be reordered, and you can remove ones you do not need. What you find here is an aggregation of information presented as scrollable widgets that can be collapsed into the minimized list of the left-hand screenshot above. However, unlike Google Now, which is search on steroids plus personalized information cards, or Briefing, which is a glorified RSS reader, Smart Bulletin tries to be something different and, LG hopes, more useful. Just as Google has Google Now when you swipe right from its launcher’s homepage and Samsung has its Briefing application, LG has its own equivalent.
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