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Battery life
Battery life is one of the hottest topics of any smart phone review, with our HTC One review being updated to 5 stars due an increase in its battery capabilities.
On a modern smartphone you should at the very least expect a whole days usage from it, something that seems very fair. That said, everybody uses their phones for different things, so it can be a bit more difficult.
Moving up from featurephones, where batteries can easily last a week on a charge, might be a bit of a shock.
For starters LG claims the Optimus L5 2 can last two days before needing a charge. Whilst this might not be a week, two days is a very impressive figure for a smartphone.
With our video tests the 1700mAh battery is comparable with just about every battery that we have tested, being less impressive than the smaller (1500mAh) Samsung Galaxy S3 Mini battery, but on par with the Huawei Ascend G510.
That said, we put the Optimus L5 2 through a day's standard use, played a few games, sent a few texts, made a few calls and we still had considerable charge left.
After a day's light usage, on Wi-Fi all day, sending a few texts, receiving one phone call and sending two emails, we hard 56% battery left.
The big disappointment with the battery life is that the there is no auto brightness setting for the screen. That said, that often meant that we had it on the lowest setting whilst inside which can only have helped preserve the battery.
Being able to quickly toggle through most of the power settings in the notification menu also helped a lot.
Connectivity
As smartphones become more and more connected, this section gets a little more difficult to write each time without sounding like we're filling every phone going with oodles of praise. We're going to try and start this section then, with some negatives.
Would you believe it but the Optimus L5 2 doesn't come with 4G or DLNA streaming?! OMG right?! NO INFRARED EITHER?! Shocking. Let's face it, these features are only starting to grace the highest end phones (the HTC One, Samsung Galaxy S4 and Sony Xperia Z).
We can be a bit more sceptical over DLNA streaming though, as that did manage to make its way over to competition like the Ascend G510.
What you do get, is a 3G, NFC and Bluetooth enabled, Wi-Fi (802.11b/g/n) toting smartphone with GPS and A-GPS support. It's a fairly standard, but still impressive spec sheet. The Optimus L5 2 does also double up as a portable Wi-Fi hotspot.
We don't envision this being used a lot, as we can imagine the contracts that accompany the L5 2 to come with some severely restricted data allowances, but it works well if you have a bit more data to gobble through.
Connection to a PC is done via the supplied microUSB cable. The Optimus L5 2 then provides a couple of options that can be changed whilst connected. These are Charge, Media Sync (MTP), USB Tethering, LG Software or Camera (PTP).
Media Sync is just a fancy way of saying that the Optimus L5 2 is connected up as a mass storage device, to drag and drop files from the PC to the phone.
We were a little worried by the warning message on our PC saying that the L5 2 might not be able to play the files we had transferred, but this wasn't an issue.
The filing system on the L5 2 meant that anything transferred can be easily accessed via the bundled File Manager.
The other options available are fairly standard, allowing a quicker charge via the USB cable, sharing the L5 2's data connection as a wired modem, or transferring files using downloaded software.
