LG Velvet review: A second first chance By Android Authority

So, you guys might already know this, but when the LG Bill Deck got announced for South, Korea I got really excited, and I didn't get excited because it's a phone with the best newest specs or a killer feature, but I got excited because I'll chase. Finally, finally, making a new brand identity and honestly this has been really long overdue. I mean LG. Phones are legitimately perfect. The LG v60 had perfect battery life. It has ip68 water resistance.

It has a quad DAC with a headphone jack. Furthermore, it's got, expandable storage I mean it has a lot of features that a lot of power users like, but the problem that LG have suffered with for the last few years is that it just hasn't changed its brand identity at all. Now, that's not to say that other manufacturers completely switch up their designs every single generation. But if you look at most phones, they do drastically change in design, at least every two generations, or so, whereas the LG G series and the LG v series have remained pretty similar generation / generation, so the LG velvet is LG's first swing at something totally new in a while and I guess. The question is: does it actually live up to the hype? So obviously the first thing that we got to talk about is the design.

How did LG do with that? Well, personally, I love. It LG says that they were trying to bring the velvet back to this nature, aesthetic kind of like we saw in the doc cs3, but obviously a lot more modern. Now LG put a curved display in a curved back on this phone and I actually made the camera array literally. Look like a water droplet, that's dropping behind the phone I think it looks awesome personally, and I'm really surprised at how thin they were able to make this thing. The lg velvet is really thin.

It's seven point nine millimeters, then that's almost Nokia Sirocco levels of thin, but it still fits pretty well. In my hand, now the rails on the edge are obviously very, very tight, but overall, it still feels nice in the hand specifically because of how big the display is. Even though the phone is like super thin, they were still able to fit a Google Assistant button in the side of which I really like I love dedicated hardware buttons. For that, although you can't remap it that kind of sucks, but you know that's how it goes also, they were able to fit a headphone jack in the bottom of the phone. I thought that the headphone jack would be the first thing to go since they're, trying to reinvent themselves and make such a thin phone, and fortunately they did keep it around, but unfortunately they did remove the quad deck, which a lot of people really liked on previous LG phones, now I've been getting a lot of questions since I first got the phone asking if it sounds significantly worse than the v60 because of the lack of the quad deck and I tested this phone a lot between the v60 and the velvet- and these are my impressions first and foremost, I am far from an audio expert.

This is just what I'm hearing from my cheap wired headphones. Now, when you plug in some headphones and don't change any settings, the velvet definitely sounds a little flatter than it did on the LG v 60, but LG does have a setting called the 3d sound engine on both the phones that tries to basically tune the sound that you're hearing to sound, more full and sound more like it is a deck and when I turn that on the velvet, I honestly couldn't tell the difference between the velvet and the LG v 60 the 3d sound engine made it sound a lot clearer and made it sound louder. It gave it the stereo effect and again, I am far from an audio expert or an audiophile, and I'm not going to pretend to be, but just for my impressions, I personally couldn't tell the difference between the 3d audio sound engine on the velvet and the v60 with the deck on now. If this is really important to you, you should definitely try to try the velvet yourself if they're selling the velvet in, like a carrier, store or something nearby, because not me gonna, be able to tell you exactly how that sounds. Unless you hear yourself, okay, now normally with a design, this thin I'd be a little worried about the battery life, but LG was actually able to stick a forty-three hundred million power battery in this phone, which is pretty surprising for how thin it actually is.

As far as what that battery life translated to it's pretty much exactly average. This isn't totally amazing killer battery life, like we saw on LG v 60, and it's also not trash battery life like we saw on the pixel, for it's pretty much exactly what I would expect from a 20/20 smartphone I got 25 hours of you. I got six hours of screen on time and that's pretty much the benchmark. For me personally for my use now, I was hoping for a little better battery life, especially since this phone is 1080p, and it's running the snapdragon 765 G. But again that doesn't mean it's bad.

It still lasts a full BAE. Now, sadly, the charging on this phone is pretty slow. It does come with an 18 watt, fast charger, but it took two hours to fill the velvet to full, and maybe I've been spoiled by superfast charging phones lately, but two hours to charge your phone from zero to 100% seems like a really long time now. Lg did include wireless charging in this phone just like we would expect from LG. So that's really nice to see, especially because I have all these wireless chargers scattered around my apartment.

Okay, so that sounds like a lot of perfect things. We've got ip68 water resistance, we've got a headphone jack, expandable storage, pretty good audio quality decent battery life, but performance was not great. Now that's kind of surprising, because the velvet does have six again bytes of RAM and 128 gigabytes of storage, which is pretty much the normal, the average of what you'd expect in an Android phone in 2020. But during my review period with the velvet I did experience a decent amount of lag and jitter, especially in multitasking or looking through the app drawer or if I was trying to go into the settings menu. Sometimes it would just take like multiple seconds to open different settings and this isn't a deal-breaker for a phone by a long shot, but when there's so many phones on the market right now, even mid-range phones that don't lag while you use them, it's pretty frustrating to have those stutters and inconsistencies in the device, and something else I need to bring up is that my unit had the weird digitizer issue, or sometimes it just wouldn't notice.

My finger was swiping on the phone and sometimes the acceleration curve, when I would swipe up or down just felt really, really off. Now, let's talk about those cameras, because the cameras are kind of the focal point of the back of this phone. So you'd think it would be pretty good, and they're not really they're, actually pretty bad, but before we get into that, we have to give a thanks to our sponsor the official Python certification bundle. So you're, probably stuck at home right now, like pretty much everyone these days, so you might as well learn programming. The Python certification model can help you go from absolute scratch to building practical apps for just $50.

So if you're interested in learning more check out the link in the video description, the velvet ended to underexpose like every photo that I would take with it unless I zoomed in to 2x or more, which is really weird, because it doesn't have an optical telephoto lens. It's definitely cropping to zoom. So it's doing some weird software trickery to actually bring up the exposure there and with darker colors. It would actually make those colors darker while making lighter colors look washed out, so dark blues looked like they were almost black and then reds and whites were really raised to make it feel like they were just washed out and totally not saturated. It was just a really weird color profile that I haven't really seen before, and even laying the selfie camera definitely did pretty good.

Furthermore, it didn't over soften my face, and it also didn't over sharpen my face, but as soon as I added. In contrast, it just could not balance that at all. If there was a bright light in the background, it would just totally blow that out now it was exposing four faces, which is pretty important. You want to get faces exposed correctly, but it wasn't metering the background at all and would just blow everything out. Oh, an LG might be dumping the G series and V series, but they also made a dual screen for the LG velvet.

So if you're one of those hardcore dual screen fans who really likes having that second display, that can be really handy now. I personally, don't find the dual display that useful, but I do know other people that do find it useful and if you're one of those people who like to read an article while watching a video on the second display that could be really nice. This could be used as a good 3d SMU later there are a lot of things that you could do with the dual display: I, just personally, don't really fit any of those categories. Now LG does have some built-in functionality with the dual display. They can let you use the dual display as a keyboard, which is a horrible experience.

They will let you split a YouTube video between the displays, which is also a horrible experience. Honestly I think that the things that you can do with the dual display that are not native to the dual display are more useful than all the implementations that LG has introduced for it. I'm also personally kind of annoyed at the bottom of this dual display, just like the v60. It charges with this proprietary Pogo pin, which is really easy to lose, and it can only be attached to one USB-C port time and because of the depth between the bottom of the headphone jack and the bottom of the dual display. If you like, a thicker, headphone cable, it probably won't fit in the dual display case.

So you're going to have to take the phone out. If you actually want that to work in the last major accessory. That LG is making work with the velvet is this bamboo pen, and they actually made this work with the v60 as well. They just didn't really advertise it or send it with my review unit, and it's nice having a bamboo pen that works really natively with the software like there are settings in the phone for the bamboo pen to work with you've got a couple buttons on the pen that you can set actions for. If you like, doodling on your phone, then it could be really useful.

Personally, I do think it's probably just another accessory that I'm going to lose, but if you're, someone that likes doodling on your phone, and you want a doodle with the dual display, which would actually be more useful, then that could be really handy as well and again. This is a third party product, so it's not like. You have to buy it if you buy the velvet. So what does this all account to well? I can confidently say that I am proud of LG for stepping outside its comfort zone and producing a product, that's going to appeal to a pretty different audience, even though it's still keeping a lot of the features that that core audience really liked. I really like the headphone jack, even if it doesn't have the quad DAC I'm glad it still has wireless charging.

It has ip68 water resistance, expandable storage, but I was still pretty disappointed by both the performance and the cameras, and we still don't have pricing or availability for the velvet in the United States or in a lot of regions. But if you take the pricing from South Korea, you translate it over to US dollars. It's about seven hundred and thirty dollars, and my friend Martin over at tech, alter found a deal that was happening in Germany Italy in a couple other countries where you could buy the velvet for the equivalent of about seven hundred and thirty US dollars, you'd also get the dual display and some truly wireless headphones, which is actually a pretty decent deal. Without that bundle. Seven hundred and thirty dollars is kind of a lot of money to pay for this phone and that's mostly because of the performance and the cameras in modern day flagships.

Those are really the two things that you're paying for when you buy a flagship phone you're buying the latest Snapdragon processor, unless you're buying an Enos or something, and you're buying some perfect cameras and unfortunately, it has neither of those. But just like the v60, it did keep the things that it held as its priorities like the headphone jack ip68, water resistance and expandable storage. Honestly I do think that the mediocre performance is kind of a major issue, especially at seven hundred and thirty dollars. Almost every single manufacturer makes a phone that, even if it doesn't have the latest flagship processor, doesn't stutter or have all these weird touch problems that I experienced on my velvet, and you can also buy a phone from last year for probably way under seven hundred and thirty dollars. That has last year's flagship chip, but I mean if you're, someone that loves the design and colors of the velvet.

You really want the headphone jack. You really want that 3d sound engine and maybe the IP six, a water resistance, an expandable storage I mean LG kind of always offers the bells and whistles anyways. Guys that's been about it for our LG velvet review. Let me know your thoughts in the comment section down below and make sure you read the article over on Android authority. Comm I spent a lot of time putting together that written article as well as this video.

So if you could go over there and comment, that would mean a lot as well until next time, I'll catch you in the next video.

Source : Android Authority