LG has been pretty active in 2016 thus far. The much sought after releases of the G5 and the G5 SE have been the highlights. While these flagships have done their bit to make a name for themselves, another of its 2016 releases in the form of the LG K5 has been an overall disappointment. To cover that up, LG decided to beef up the K5 and out came the K8. While there are definite improvements in the K8, we’ve seen other manufacturers do much better within the same price.

Body and Display

While the LG K5 and K8 look very similar from the front, there are some noticeable differences between the two. The K5’s back features a textured finish compared to the K5’s matt finish and the back also houses a trademark LG trait in the form of the volume rocker and the power button. This enhances the K8’s usability making it more firmly in your control.

The display is significantly better than its counterpart albeit it offers the same screen size. The display though, does come in with a 294ppi pixel density which happily results in a 720p HD screen resolution. Definite improvement on the 480p screen of the LG K5.

Camera

The cameras while not being LG’s best, do give good reason to feel happy. The primary camera boasts an 8 megapixel sensor with autofocus and an LED flash. The front camera thankfully supports a 5 megapixel sensor instead of the much rumored 2 megapixel one. LG’s cameras have always done well and we’ll recommend you not to doubt the capability of these cameras. Although they miss out on good camera features, we’re optimistic as to how these two will perform.

Hardware and Software

The LG K8 is powered by a Quad-core 1.3 GHz Cortex-A53 processor with an additional 1.5GB of RAM. The processor is an improved version of the Cortex-A7 used in the K5 but when we look at the RAM, we do feel that it should’ve been at least 2GB to give the built-in Android v6.0 Marshmallow a smooth run in. The internal memory is variant dependent and we’d recommend going for the 16GB one and avoiding a memory card to receive enhanced performance.