Networks offer B&O perks with LG G5 pre-orders

Both operators are including a pair of B&O Play H3 earphones with the modular phones, but EE have also said they'll be including a Play S3 speaker in a bundle worth more than £400.

Depending on which network people opt for, tariffs range from £26 a month for 500MB of data with an upfront cost of £99, to £79.99 a month for 50GB of data.

Credit: Haelen Haagen/Shutterstock.com

Plans

EE have chosen the launch of the G5 to bring in a new bundle, EE Complete.

For the princely sum of £79.99 a month it offers unlimited minutes and texts, 50GB of 4G data - and 200 minutes of calls to 084 and 087 numbers, 200 MMS messages, and 1,000 international minutes spread over five numbers.

Being a 24-month contract, it also comes with an early upgrade option, giving customers the chance to get a new phone 12 months in.

If that sounds a bit rich, there are a bewildering array of other tariffs available:

Vodafone, meanwhile, are offering the LG G5 on any of a staggering 20 tariffs, ranging from £26 a month for their Standard 500MB bundle all the way up to £75 a month for their Red Value 25GB bundle.

Their introductory offer is a little more limited, however, as the B&O headphones are only available to the first 2,000 customers ordering the phone on one of their Red or Red Value plans.

That includes both their 12 and 24 month Red contracts - although it's worth bearing in mind that the shorter contract also tends to come with higher prices.

The 12-month LG G5 contracts look like this:

The 24-month contracts are a little cheaper per month, reflecting the longer period over which customers can pay off the cost of the new handset:

At first glance, the Red Value tariffs look to be worse value than the standard Red plans - but included in the cost is a six month subscription to one of the following: Netflix, Now TV, Spotify or Sky Sports Mobile.

Anyone who'd rather not be tied into a contract and wants to buy the LG G5 as a standalone handset should expect to pay around £530.

So why would we?

Friends

The phone caused something of a stir at last month's Mobile World Congress, thanks largely to its modular design.

The bottom third of the phone - which contains the battery - is removable, with a variety of add-ons available to replace it.

Known as the "LG Friends", the range currently includes the LG Cam Plus, which provides additional battery capacity as well as enabling users to more easily use the camera one-handed.

The LG Hi-Fi Plus, created in partnership with Bang and Olufsen, will dramatically improve the quality and sound of any audio output, thanks to 32-bit sound processing and a Digital to Analogue Converter and amplifier unit.

Other attachments will arrive in the near future - LG have recently been hosting developer conferences to encourage third parties to build their own modules.

The phone will also be compatible with a variety of other LG devices, including the LG 360 VR virtual reality headset and wide-angle camera, the Rolling Bot ball-shaped remote surveillance camera, and a Bluetooth headset.

Specs

Forgetting its friends for a moment, the phone itself boasts an all-metal build and decent-sized 5.3 inch Quad HD screen.

Behind the scenes, the quad core processor runs at 2.2GHz and comes with 4GB of RAM. There's also 32GB of on-board storage, which can be boosted to 200GB by making use of the microSD card slot.

The handset has an 8 megapixel front-facing camera, and an additional two lenses at the back - one 16 megapixel and the other 8 megapixel, which can be used together to create wide-angle shots that capture everything we can see in our own field of vision.

The phone's power button - found at the back - has a fingerprint scanner embedded in it. This enables the owner to simply rest their finger on the button to unlock the phone.

The removable battery meanwhile offers up to 20 hours of talk-time, and 380 hours of standby time - though this will be less important for those also carrying around extra battery power in add-ons like the LG Cam Plus.