New Lg K7 K330 8gb Black 4g Lte T-mobile Review

The LG K7 is your standard entry-level carrier phone. Available on T-Mobile for $139.99, information technology offers decent performance, good network connectivity, and a fairly attractive, sturdy pattern. But the handset also illustrates the leaps and premises unlocked phones have made over the last year in relation to carrier offerings. Both the Motorola Moto G4 Play and the Blu R1 HD get y'all meliorate hardware and more up-to-engagement Android software for nearly the same cost (or lower). And both phones work on T-Mobile, and so there's little reason to pick the K7 instead.

Blueprint, Features, and Display
The LG K7 is a fairly standard black polycarbonate slab, just it bucks expectations by calculation some curves. The front is covered in a layer of drinking glass that bends gently to come across the sides, while the back cover is made of grippy plastic. Information technology feels sturdy, and has a nicer look and experience than the ZTE Gorging Plus.

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The compact K7 measures 5.seven by 2.9 past 0.4 inches (HWD) and weighs 4.9 ounces, which is roughly the same size and weight equally the G4 Play (v.7 by 2.8 by 0.four inches, 4.eight ounces) and the R1 HD (v.6 past 2.8 by 0.3 inches, 5.0 ounces). It'south nigh an ounce lighter than the Avid Plus, despite both phones having the aforementioned overall dimensions. You lot'll take no trouble using the K7 with ane hand.

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The handset has LG'south signature rear power push, with a pair of volume buttons higher up and beneath. Peeling the back encompass off gives you admission to a removable battery, a SIM card slot, and a microSD carte slot that worked fine with a 256GB Samsung Evo+ bill of fare. The bottom has a micro USB charging port and a three.5mm sound jack for headphones.

A 5-inch, 854-by-480 IPS LCD used to be for entry-level phones a couple of years ago, but now it just looks dated. Working out to a paltry 196 pixels per inch (ppi), the display isn't nearly as sharp at the 720p panels on the R1 HD and the G4 Play (both 294ppi). Some pixelation is noticeable upon close inspection, though colors are accurate and viewing angles are expert. Outdoor utilise isn't so cracking, as the brandish doesn't get very bright and tends to be a chip reflective, making information technology difficult to see in direct sunlight.

Network Functioning and Connectivity
The K7 operates on T-Mobile's GSM network and supports LTE bands 2, iv, and 12, offering the aforementioned connectivity every bit the Gorging Plus. You'll find a more comprehensive set of bands on the G4 Play, which is uniform with every major United states of america carrier, including Sprint and Verizon. That said, network performance on the K7 was solid in testing. The phone showed download speeds upwards to 19Mbps in midtown Manhattan. It supports Wi-Fi connectivity on the 2.4GHz band.

Voice calls are besides expert. Transmissions are clear and racket counterfoil is solid, making it like shooting fish in a barrel to carry on a chat in a noisy environment. Voices can take a somewhat raspy, robotic quality to them, but it doesn't impact overall clarity.

Processor, Bombardment, and Camera
The K7's Qualcomm Snapdragon 210 processor is another piece of hardware that used to be standard for entry-level phones a while back, only but feels dated next to the current crop of unlocked handsets. Despite an undemanding display, the K7 scored a low fifteen,375 on the AnTuTu benchmark, which tests overall organisation performance. That's less than the Avid Plus (20,252), which has the aforementioned hardware. And information technology'south about one-half as much as the Snapdragon 410-powered G4 Play (28,647) and the MediaTek 6735-powered R1 Hard disk (31,847). The K7 was unable to complete GFXBench, which tests graphics performance.

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Notwithstanding, if you're just looking for standard functionality, the K7 can handle apps like Camera, Chrome, Gmail, Maps, Messages, and YouTube without much difficulty. Information technology has 1.5GB of RAM, which allows for a low-cal degree of multitasking, but trying to do as well much will cause slowdowns and force groundwork apps to close. Loftier-end games aren't playable, simply simple ones like Aroused Birds run fine.

Battery life is decent. The telephone clocked 5 hours and 57 minutes when we set screen brightness to maximum and streamed total-screen video over LTE. That's exactly the same amount of runtime as the R1 Hard disk, simply about two hours less than the G4 Play's impressive 7 hours and fifty minutes. You should notwithstanding become a day'southward worth of average apply out of the K7, and the battery is removable so you tin can carry a spare and swap it out every bit needed.

The K7 has matching five-megapixel photographic camera sensors on the front and back that are surprisingly divergent in epitome quality. The rear-facing sensor takes muddy pictures, fifty-fifty in well-lit outdoor settings. Autoexposure is particularly poor, every bit several pictures I took of a sunny street looked adumbral in darkness. Indoors, mistiness and grain predominate and the camera is often unable to detect focus. You can tape 720p video at 30fps, but it suffers from the same issues.

The v-megapixel forepart-facing camera is another story. Pictures I took outside were clear, and autoexposure had no difficulty. Overall, the K7's rear camera is worse than the R1 Hard disk drive, the G4 Play, and the Avid Plus, simply its forepart-facing sensor matches or surpasses the lot of them.

Software
The K7 ships running the outdated Android 5.one.1 Lollipop. We don't expect information technology to get an updates to Android vi.0 Marshmallow, permit alone Android 7.0 Nougat. There's a heavy custom UI layer running on top with changes to app icons, the Settings menu, and the lock screen.

In that location isn't much in the way of features, though, because there isn't a lot of room to put them. The phone simply comes with 8GB of storage, and leaves only half (3.94GB) for your own apply. The paucity of storage isn't helped by the presence of bloatware. There are nine T-Mobile apps, one Amazon app, and an LG app pre-installed. But the LG app can be removed; the residuum tin can only be disabled.

Conclusions
The LG K7 feels solid, offers good network connectivity, and can run most basic apps for $140. That might have been practiced enough a couple of years agone, but it's lacking in many departments compared with a lot of the affordable unlocked phones available today. For merely $10 more, the Moto G4 Play gets you a 720p display, a solid camera, excellent battery life, and compatibility with every US carrier. For $90 less, the Blu R1 Hd also has a 720p display and much better functioning, making it our Editors' Selection for affordable phones. Either is a better pick for T-Mobile customers.

LG K7

The Bottom Line

The LG K7 is one of the virtually affordable phones you lot tin get on T-Mobile, but many more powerful options are available unlocked for similar or less coin.

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Source: https://www.pcmag.com/reviews/lg-k7

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