LG G8 ThinQ Review: A wasted opportunity By Engadget

Around this time, every year, LG releases a flagship, smartphone, and I'm always left with the same question. Is this the year LG comes out with something truly great for the past few years, LG has made some steady progress, but with this the new $820 LG g8 know it just feels like a disappointment and that's not because it's a bad phone mind you's because LG tried to set it apart from the competition with some ambitious features that honestly just don't help all that much, but we'll get to those I want to make clear upfront that if nothing else, the g8 basics are solid. DG, it's body a sleeker than it used to be an LG managed to do away with a camera bump from its older models in favor of a dual camera that sits flush against the glass, and this is definitely a minimal design. But all the necessary touches are here. You've got a headphone jack next to the USB-C port on the bottom, a spot for SIM cards and micro SD cards and a dedicated Google Assistant button. Just beneath the volume keys, I really dig this new, more streamlined.

Look, but this just might be the most slippery phone I've used in years, no matter what surface I put it down on it, wouldn't take long for the g8 to start to slip sliding away. If I were you I would put a case on it or otherwise just keep a very close eye on it. After all, the last thing you'd want to see is the g8 taking a nasty spill on the floor. You might damage this pretty 6.1 inch display. I have had my issues with LG's plastic LED displays in the past, but the g8 screen has dodged them all nicely.

It's all bright, colors and crisp visuals, since it runs the 31 20 by 1440, and despite how slippery the phone can be. Sometimes these screens in 19 and a half by 9 aspect ratios means you do get quite a bit of real estate in a package that doesn't strain your hands, meth screen, isn't all it appears to be, though, in its search for ultimate sleekness, LG ditched the traditional earpiece entirely in favor of what it calls a crystal sound OLED. In other words, they turn the whole screen into a speaker. It works surprisingly well for talking to people at least the phone calls I took over the past week came through loud and clear and since the speaker is basically being screened, I didn't have to worry about lying. My ear up with an earpiece precisely this oddball screen.

Speaker combination, isn't quite as good when you're listening to music, though by working together with a single speaker each tune of the phone's bottom, the screen is supposed to deliver balanced, stereo sound. Instead, what I got was loud but hollow and unsatisfying audio, which is a shame, because otherwise this phone might take audio quality more seriously than any other out there right now, plug in a pair of headphones, for example, and you'll get crisp super loud audio thanks to the g8 s capable hi-fi, audio components, performance and battery have been nothing to sneeze at either. Like the other flagships, you can expect to see this year. The g8 packs one of Qualcomm's premium, snapdragon 855 chipsets this time with six gigs of RAM, and yes, that's a little less, rather than what you'd find in devices like the Galaxy S 10. But it really doesn't make a difference in terms of power for multitasking or playing really graphically intense games.

The g8 think you can hang with the best of them and with a 3,500 William hour battery tucked away inside, you can usually count on g8 to stick around for between one and two full days of use. Depending on how hard you push the thing things get a little dicey here when it comes to the g8 s. Camera sorry, cameras around back, you'll find the 12 megapixel main camera, with its F 1.5 aperture and optical image. Stabilization, along with the 16 megapixel wide camera that captures a hundred and seven degree fields of view. In general, the G its photos are pretty good.

I mean you'll find quite a bit of detail in the shots and with HDR or LG's AI cam feature enabled colors seem pretty bright, no matter which of the cameras you use, though you'll probably notice photo, is looking a little overexposed and LG's image processing occasionally makes some photos. Look unnaturally sharp new features like a night VMO do help the g8 in the dark, but results aren't nearly as good as what you'd get out of last year's pixel 3 long stories short, the g8 cameras aren't bad, but they're. Definitely a notch below what I would have hoped for out of a 20-19 flagship phone. There is one more camera we need to talk about, though it's called the Z camera, and it powers. The features LG really hoped would set the g8 apart from the pack, it's technically what's called a time of flight sensor if you're not familiar in a myths and captures infrared light to figure out its distance from the subject and to generate depth information.

So what did LG decide to do with all of that depth data? Obviously it cooked up some gesture control, so you can use the g8 without actually having to touch it. These air motion gestures can help you launch certain apps playing possums, take screenshots and even control the phone's volume fair enough, but to do any of those things you first have to hold your hand between five and eight inches away from the camera, then hope the phone notices. Then you curl your fingers into a sort of claw hope the phone notices that and then flick your wrist or close your hand to accomplish whatever small task it is. You wanted to complete in the first place after you get these gestures down. Air motion is actually kind of cool, but it just it's not practical at all.

Do you know what can handle just about all of those tasks in less time and with much less hassle? Google Assistant, woofs commands works so much more reliably of an air motion here that it's laughable I have to wonder why LG even bothered with this LG's hand, ID feature also uses the Z camera to look at the veins, in your hand, to unlock your phone, which sounds kind of amazing, but just like air motion. It's neat in theory, but a total pain to actually use over the past week. I have registered and re registered my hand several times in hopes of finally getting the feature to work correctly and on literally my tenth attempt I finally got it working that should have been it right. No, of course not the real problem is that getting your hand where it needs to be on the first or second or sometimes even third, try is nearly impossible. The g8 does give you some on-screen directions, but even those don't help most of the time more often than not, it took several tries to actually unlock the phone with the palm of my hand and since hand ID only works when the screen is on chances are you're.

Going to have to touch this phone to wake it up anyway, like air motion hand, ID feels like something LG cooked up just to prove that it could with very little concern for practice or ease-of-use. What a waste that's core when you strip away some of these really finicky uneven extras, the g8 is a solid device, but when you consider just how capable how polished some competition is, it's hard to look at everything else, you did here and say man I have got to have a g8, maybe when the price drops and if LG makes some software improvements, this thing could be worth your time until then it is an easy skip.

Source : Engadget