REVIEW: LG G8X in 2021 - Best Value Flagship Android Smartphone?! Sad Farewell to LG... By OSReviews

Hey all your OS reviews, some of you guys, may have heard that lg is shutting down its mobile phone division here in 2021, meaning they will no longer make any smartphones in the foreseeable future. It's really unfortunate, since lg has been a player in the space for the past decade and brought out many interesting creative devices. Lg is certainly not alone in this dilemma, as we've seen brands like HTC, which were once very dominant players just starting to find it really tough to compete and fading into the background a bit. So in today's video I thought it would be fitting to revisit one of lg's smartphones. This is the lg g8x and to see how it holds up today. So this was a phone that was released at the end of 2019, making it now roughly 1.5 years old and for the age of the smartphone. It remains one of the best values that you can find when it comes to the specs.

That has always been an area where lg's phones, because of relatively poor marketing decisions, tended to have pretty sharp reductions in price after getting released. For instance, you can find this one in refurbished condition for less than 150 bucks if you shop around on Amazon or eBay, which is pretty much in budget territory for smartphones these days, and it's an incredible value, considering the phone packs, a snapdragon 855 series processor, which again you'll also find on Galaxy S10 series and even the OnePlus 7 series, but both of those phones still sell today for about two times the price. One of the bright spots that came out of the announcement at least a silver lining is lg, stated that they would be continuing their promise of having three years of software updates to their smartphones, which were released in 2019 onwards. So that means the g8x actually fits into that territory. Coming back to the phone's design, it has a 6.4 inch, OLED display that has a 1080p resolution. One of the critiques at the time of the phone's release was it's a standard 60hz refresh rate which, compared to other flagship phones that started to introduce 90, hertz or even 120hz, gave you a bit more of fluidity and smoothness.

As you were scrolling. What I will say, though, is faster refresh rate screens, although cool to have does draw power more quickly, so, depending on what your priorities are. If you want to have the best battery life, then perhaps something like this is not really a huge drawback at the end of the day, so, combined with a standard full HD plus resolution, instead of using 2k plus a pretty large 4 000 William hour capacity, battery does mean that this phone is awesome in terms of battery endurance, and even if you get a used unit, it will still last you well over a day. In fact, in moderate usage or light usage, this is a phone that you can definitely get past. I would say two days, maybe stretching three days before you need to recharge it again, and it charges up very quickly too using Qualcomm's quick charge, as well as supporting QI, wireless charging and really, aside from the refresh rate, everything else about this phone was as good as those other flagships that it tried to compete with this.

One here also has six gigabytes of ram along with 128 gigs of built-in storage, which is further expandable via a micro SD card slot that also dubs as a sim card slot on the top of the phone like several of lg's the most recent phones, the g8x also supports what they call a dual screen case, which is an optional accessory that you can pick up now for about a hundred bucks that transforms it into something that can be easier for multitasking and similar to the surface. Duo. You're able to open up two apps at the same time use a second screen as a keyboard. You can think of it as a more practical folding accessory for the phone, although not as sleek as a true folding display like what you'll find on the galaxy fold, for instance, and it can be removed. If you don't need it also again, if you're looking to save some money- and you don't absolutely need to have multitasking, you can just pick up the phone alone.

Like other flagships these days, the phone is also going to be splash proof, in fact it's ip68, so you can submerge it in up to 1.5 meters of water for up to 30 minutes, and it will still survive, despite still looking very petite and beautiful. So the backing of the phone is also protected by corning gorilla glass changes to an almost bluish hue, but it is very subtle. One of the best things I think about this phone's design is that lg kept the camera system integrated underneath the glass meaning that there is no camera bump. Everything is completely flush. Nothing will protrude when you put it onto a table, and it's just very sleek and easy to clean everything off.

Speaking of those cameras, the g8x has a 12 megapixel primary lens, a company with a 13 megapixel ultra-wide. Now, for folks that aren't aware, lg is actually the first smartphone company to really introduce a wide-angle lens on their smartphones back with the lg g5, and it's something that they've continued to use on. Every generation of their flagship, smartphone and all the edges of the phones are constructed out of this curved metallic aluminum alloy. That has a great density to it. The materials and weight feels as good as any newest, iPhone or Samsung Galaxy device.

Now, on the base of the phone, you also find some specialties of lg phones, which are they always retained. A headphone jack on all of their flagship phones and audio is one department that they've taken really seriously over the past few years, and they actually have retained in here a quad DAC that can drive impressive audiophile grade headphones, one of the few smartphones that can even rival dedicated hi-fi grade mp3 players. If you are listening to lossless, music and flack, and you can drive large studio headphones as well, it's kind of a niche function. But again, if you care a lot about the music, it was one thing that really set lg phones apart and the lg g8x was no exception. Along with that, though, it still has the typical type c port for charging, as well as dual speakers built on in, so one is at the base, but the top earpiece also dubs as a left channel.

Otherwise, another thing that was interesting about the g8x compared to the standard g8 that came out just a little before this was having an optical in-display fingerprint reader. Overall, it works all right. I wouldn't say it's as fast as a traditional rear mounted fingerprint sensor, but it does have its conveniences, such as. If you have your phone lying flat on a table, you can just unlock it with your finger, and it looks very cool. We can see that there is going to be a small teardrop notch on the top to house a 32, megapixel, front-facing camera bezel sizes on the sides, I think, are reasonable and still gives you a very immersive experience as you're holding the phone and the chin at the bottom is also pretty slim.

Thanks to the fact that the phone is using an OLED display in the auto mode, the screen can get as bright as over 600 nits, which is great. You can still see it clearly, even in outdoor conditions, no problems, and since it is an OLED screen, it has excellent contrast levels. You can enable a system-wide dark theme to conserve on battery and everything. Just really pops supports hdr10. The color temperature of the screen can also be further adjusted if you prefer to have something more tuned for cinema sports gaming modes or go into an auto mode that can allow you to change the color temperature RGB in more detail.

Now we do have lg skin on top of again android 10.0 on this particular phone, which, in my opinion, is not really that obtrusive. I think lg has actually done a great job over the years stripping back some bloatware and some of the features that folks have complained about. Now. It's actually giving us a relatively clean version of the OS, with just a few cosmetic differences compared to stock android. For instance, all of their phones retains the double tap to wake, as well as to sleep, the phone's display, which is something that they first introduced back in the kind of lg g2 g3 days, and it is again one thing that many other smartphone companies have tried to imitate.

We have just a handful of tools from lg, including a memo pad essentials, like a calculator and voice recorder and speaking of voice recorder. There is a kind of interesting mode that the phone offers, including ASMR, so it bumps up the sensitivity of the microphone and allows you to talk very quietly into it and create some interesting effects that way offering uh hi-fi grade voice recording as well. The only thing that is different from a stock phone would be Facebook as well as Amazon. Prime video and Amazon shopping are the three apps that are pre-installed, but you can always uninstall them. If you don't like it, so things have gotten considerably better compared to past editions of lg skin.

Maybe the icons are still rounded off at the edges, but I still think it's a cute overall, aesthetic that they're going for and then the drag down notification shade you can see here. It does remind me a little of Samsung's one UI, but not in a bad way. The icons here are blue you're, able to turn off on and off functions like there is NFC on here for mobile payment. The dual screen case can also be activated an ultra battery saving mode. Other things on here include turning on or off the hi-fi quad DAC.

If you have headphones plugged in and there's also a DTS 3d surround sound mode. That will further enhance these stereo speakers, giving you more separation- and here is nova launcher by the way that you can also install if you prefer, at a click of a button. Speaking of the phone's fluidity overall, as you can see here in terms of swiping over the UI, is really smooth and responsive thanks to the use of that snapdragon 855 series processor, which in 2021 is still more than fast enough. In fact, for many users that are more moderate on their phones, it's actually still overkill some other elements of the flagship phone that you'll start to notice. Once you pick one up and using it is the excellent haptic engine.

So as you're doing things like typing, the keyboard gives you subtle, vibrations and everything feels really precise and well tuned. So let's jump into the camera performance next, although arguably not quite as good as say a Google Pixel in terms of the photo experience, lg's phones do shine in terms of giving you a ton of features that you can try out in their software, as well as lots of custom pro modes which are unique that we'll talk about here. So one of the things that they're introducing on the g8x is an AI scene detection mode. So if you point different objects at it, so, for example, right now you can see it's recognized that this is a flower, so it will try to change the color temperature of the shot to give you the best effect, depending on what you are looking at versus, say, a text you can see it will detect that as a piece of paper and then try to change the properties to compensate the Google integration with lg's. G8X is done surprisingly.

Well, that's actually not the only area where it's baked into the software, for example, there is a physical button on the side here that I didn't mention previously. That's a Google Assistant key so similar to how the Google pixels you can kind of squeeze their older phones to bring up the assistant. You can find it on the lg g8x by simply tapping on this button portrait mode that creates a both effect. If you're pointing at an object. Everything behind it will go out of focus and there's also a studio lighting mode which is kind of similar to what the iPhone introduced a while back.

This mode works only if you're pointing it at a person. However, and if you do that, you will be able to change things like the background image. So, for example, you can take a picture of someone's head and everything outside their head will turn say: orange, yellow or black or any other color like if you were shooting it in a studio against the wall. There are other properties that you can work with if you're wanting to shoot stars at night, it's not quite as good as macrophotography on the pixel phones, but it's very good still, and there is a dedicated night mode as well coming over to video. The phone does allow you to record 4k resolution footage, and again it gives you a few different selection options when it comes to recording the sound, such as an ASMR mode, is also baked directly into the video mode, also able to have focus, locking and adjust this directly using the slider bar.

So you can create some really cool effects like getting a particular frame of the video to be out of focus and then slowly fade into focus and then out of focus. It really is a very pro effect and something that you just don't get in the software of almost any other smartphone unless you're downloading third-party apps. To do this, taking a closer look at some of the images that I took from this phone's camera directly again, it looks excellent and then here's some example of shots outdoors again hers, preserving plenty of colors and details in the shadows. Here's one of flowers here in spring and the flower petals, these tiny little flowers are still looking quite good easy to take images and fast to respond without slowing down. Here's an example of the wide angle lens which, as you can see here, also looks very good and there is HDR support in the wide-angle lens department as well, so standing in the same spot.

This is an image taken with the regular lens, and then here is the wide-angle lens you're able to see just a bit more on the sides. As you can see there, but it doesn't really bend or distort at the edges either now moving over to taking a closer look at the video playback experience, let's jump into YouTube and also crank up the sound of the speakers and do a quick demo. So all right, so some takeaways here is again. It does have stereo speakers that work pretty well, although the bottom firing speaker is a little louder than the top earpiece speaker still works great and gets you a bit more of added immersion as you're listening to music, even with the built-in speakers. But of course you can further improve the experience using the headphones that you plug in wireless headphones using Bluetooth, 5.0 or anything like that. Let's try web browsing next, and it's no surprise that the experience is also super fluid lg's keyboard by the way that you can also switch the g board.

If you don't like, it also has a few extras, including you can tap on the main space bar and jump left and right basically to scroll through text, and there are haptic vibrations, as you are scrolling, so very similar to what apple has on their iOS devices and another trick here is because the phone is very wide. You can also split the keyboard apart when you're typing in this vertical orientation. As you can see there- or you can also pinch together to have it in this traditional view, so you can customize this to your liking again because of the snapdragon 855 great antenna bands. Everything opens up pretty much instantaneously, as you can see there, even for really complex pages and sites with lots of ads and video elements. I think one of the more impressive things that is implicit about the smaller architecture of the snapdragon 855 against seven nanometers is really the efficiency.

This is a phone that, even if you're doing a ton of demanding tasks, whether it's multitasking playing back games or taking photos it just very rarely gets hot or even warm as you are using it. Never really. Thermal throttles, in fact, you're able to rapidly charge the phone while gaming and the phone still never gets hot and here's another feature that I found out about. Lg's newer phones like the g8x, it has a desktop mode. So if you plug the type c port onto any monitor or TV, it can transform it into kind of like a mini computer.

Samsung also has their equivalent called Samsung. DEX Huawei also has it on their phones, but it's a feature that I didn't really realize that lg had on their devices because again, lg's marketing is just not the greatest, so you're able to say open up certain apps by double tapping here, and you can see it will open up in a reliable window. I can open up another tab like YouTube, and it will float in a different window. You can, of course, also connect a say, Bluetooth, keyboard or mouse to the phone and then just use it like a small computer or a Chromebook replacement. The phone you can also do other things on doesn't really interfere with the second display, and you can even just turn off the phone's display, and the monitor here still turns on.

I think the last thing to talk about here would be some gaming experience, even the most demanding of titles, including again asphalt 9, which they have here as an example, or even things like pub g will open up within just about 10 seconds of you tapping on the app everything is really fast fluid. You can play back games at the fastest graphic settings, and they will still load back really quickly and give you very impressive fluidity and smoothness when you're inside again, even if you're demanding and trying to play back uh top tier games, it's not going to become an issue on this particular phone and everything is still working along, really, really well. The g8x is now the kind of the cheapest phone from that generation of devices with the snapdragon 855. On one hand, it's sad because it kind of confirms that lg really was not very good in terms of preserving the value of their phones, especially when you think about how even at these ridiculously low prices uh these days, there's still not a ton of people, picking up these phones or talking about them in the media. So that's more or less it.

As far as our revisited review of the lg g8x here in 2021 again, coupled with the kind of sad and unfortunate news that the company is leaving the smartphone market, I think this phone is definitely underrated and for the price that it's being sold at these days, it's a definite steal and at least for the foreseeable future of the next year, or so I would still highly recommend it for what it is and how it stacks up against the aforementioned competitors. So you can check out more details if you're interested in the links below, but for now that's been our video thanks for watching here at OS reviews, that's been the revisited look at the lg g8x android smartphone here in 2021.

Source : OSReviews