REVIEW: There's only one real reason to buy the LG G5

It's the only premium smartphone that lets you replace the battery.

No other premium smartphone lets you swap out the battery.

LG will give you a free second battery and charging cradle that acts like an external battery if you buy the G5 before May 2.

Fast charging is a welcome feature.

The G5 features the new USB-C standard for charging and connecting to computers. The new plug also lets it charge faster than the previous standard, microUSB.

That means you can give the G5 quick charging boosts throughout your day so you don't run out of battery.

With charging combined with the removable battery, there's no way you could possibly run out of juice on a typical day. The G5 is the longest lasting smartphone out of all its competitors.

It works great as a premium Android smartphone.

The G5 runs on the latest and powerful Snapdragon 820 processor, which means fast performance. I can easily and quickly jump from app to app without much sign of slowing down. It also plays graphic-heavy games well.

Hiding apps you don't like is annoying.

I turned from balanced journalist to raging fan-boy when it seemed like LG ditched the Android app drawer on the G5.

The app drawer is where you can store your app icons so you can keep your home screen clean and uncluttered. It's arguably one of the main benefits of Android over iOS.

Unfortunately, the app drawer isn't on the G5 by default. You can restore the app drawer, but it's a convoluted process that involves many, many steps.

There is a workaround where you can store all your app icons into one folder and place it wherever you like, so it's not the end of the world. It's still not ideal, though.

The removable bottom is a cool idea, but there isn't much you can do with it right now.

The G5's removable bottom gives the G5 a lot of potential to do cool things that its competitors can only dream of thanks to separate modules LG calls "Friends."

For example, LG showed off a camera grip that gives you more control over taking pictures and video with the G5. However, a pre-release unit I tried didn't quite live up to expectations.

So far, the only Friend module available is the removable battery.

LG is letting developers design new modules for the G5. It'll be interesting to see what modules developers come up with, but for now, there isn't much.

The fingerprint sensor on the back works pretty well, but it can be hard to use when you can't see it.

LG has finally given its premium smartphone a fingerprint sensor, but it's on the back where the home button is and it's fairly small, which sometimes makes it hard to find with your finger when you're trying to get into the G5 quickly.

Having a fingerprint sensor on the back isn't a bad thing. The Nexus 5X and 6P also have their fingerprint sensors on the back, and my colleague Ben Gilbert thinks it's great.

However, if you want to unlock your phone when it's sitting on your desk, you have to pick it up to reach the fingerprint sensor, unless you unlock it with your PIN on the screen.

So, while the fingerprint sensor on the back is fine, a fingerprint sensor on the front like most phones is better.

No matter what, it'll come with the annoying apps (AKA bloatware) from your carrier because you can't buy it unlocked.

Unfortunately, you won't be able to buy the G5 unlocked directly from LG in the US. You have to buy it from your carrier, which means it'll come with a bunch of your carrier's awful apps that you can't uninstall.

It's not the worst thing in the world, as these apps don't take up too much of your storage, but it's still an annoyance.

Speaking of storage...

You can add more storage with a microSD card.

You can add to the G5's 32GB of built-in storage with a microSD card, which is great! Running out of space because of too many photos, videos, or music can be a thing of the past.

What's not great, however, is that you can't install apps on the microSD card, even though it's a feature in the current version of Android. That means LG actively disabled that feature on the G5. Samsung did the same thing for the Galaxy S7.

HTC's 10 is the only premium smartphone that lets you install apps onto a microSD card.

The dual camera should have been something else entirely.

Tech Insider's photography and camera expert Rafi Letzter said the G5's dual camera is "just a weird, unnecessary gimmick."

The super wide-angle lens might look cool at first, giving your photos a fisheye GoPro-style effect, but you wouldn't want that effect for every photo. As a result, you wouldn't use the super-wide angle lens as often as, say, a lens that takes pictures with a narrower field-of-view that's good for portraits.

Using Rafi's words, "If LG had attached a second lens that was even twice as zoomed-in as its standard smartphone lens, that would have been much more useful."

That said, it does have a great zoom that looks better than any other smartphone camera I've tried.

The G5 can zoom in about as much as the other smartphone cameras in its class, but the pictures look much better.

They're clearer, sharper, and almost look like you took the picture without zooming in compared to the zoom on the Galaxy S7 and iPhone 6s Plus.

But the camera isn't as good as the Galaxy S7's.

Despite having more megapixels than the Galaxy S7's 12-megapixel camera, the G5's main 16-megapixel shooter isn't quite as good.

The S7 is sharper, does better in low light, has better autofocus, and deals better with colors compared to the G5.

Check out Rafi Letzter's comparison of the LG G5's camera with the Galaxy S7's.

The G5 is a good Android phone with some neat features, but it's not a home run.

The G5 is a good, solid Android phone, and it's your only option if you want a removable battery.

But if that doesn't matter to you, the Galaxy S7 is the better choice for its camera, gorgeous design, and nifty features like wireless charging and water-resistance, all for a similar $650 price tag.