LG G7 ThinQ Review – It’s lime for LG to wade into this year’s flagship phone battle, and the G7 could be a winner. Though announced at a higher price, it’s cheaper than Apple’s iPhone 8 and Samsung’s Galaxy S9. Yet it looks and feels top end. The huge screen has almost no border and an iPhone X-style notch at the top (the areas to the left and right of the notch can be left blank or used to display notifications).
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The classy plain case is water resistant and finished in Gorilla Glass 5 front and back, which looks wonderful (at least until you cover it in fingerprints). On the back, ironically is a fingerprint reader, along with the obligatory dual cameras.
Every device seems to need a gimmick, and the G7 has a couple. There’s a button
Aside from a few gimmicks, this has everything you need and looks great
to activate Google Assistant, accompanied by far field microphone technology that helps the G7 pick up your voice against background noise. If you like voice assistants, this is very handy.
Then there’s ThinQ, which refers to artificial-intelligence features built into various LG devices. Here the most obvious ‘smart’ elements are associated with the camera, which can recognise everyday objects in a scene, label them on the screen pointlessly and often inaccurately – and adjust focus and exposure accordingly
More importantly, the twin cameras offer a choice of focal lengths the second is extra wide, rather than telephoto, so you can’t bring things any closer, but you can fit more into a shot – and support the blurred-background portrait mode very effectively. The low light mode didn’t work so well for us. but the G7 shoots fine in low light anyway. Video goes up to 4K – though there’s no high-speed 60 frames per second or slow motion at that resolution – and supports 10bit HDR colour.
Inside. LG hasn’t made last year’s mistake of skimping on the G6’s processor, and a Snapdragon 845 keeps everything in Android 8 Oreo very sprightly indeed. At 13 hours 37 minutes, battery life is decent too. it’s four hours less, though, than the OnePlus 6 – a very nice phone that’s cheaper. Even so, the G7 is a great buy for everything that it offers.
LG G7 ThinQ Review: SPECIFICATIONS
6.1in 3120×1440-pixel screen • 2x 16-megapixel rear cameras • 8-megapixel front camera • 64GB flash storage • MicroSD card slot • 802.11ac Wi-Fi • Bluetooth 5.0 • 3G/4G • Android 8.0 Oreo • 153x72x7.9mm (HxWxD) • 162g • One-year warranty
LG G7 ThinQ Review: VERDICT
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LG G7 ThinQ Review: ALTERNATIVE
No ultra-brightness or wide-angle camera, but with the same processor and storage this is very good value
LG G7 ThinQ Review: LIGHT FANTASTIC
The G7 has the brightest screen we’ve ever seen on a phone. Displaying a plain while image and after lapping the Boost icon beside the brightness slider, our test equipment clocked it at 951 candelas per square metre (cd/m2). Even once the boost has turned itself off again to save your battery, you get up to 850cd/m2 – enough to give you spots in front of your eyes if you turn it on in a dark room. You can forget checking your emails as you settle down in the cinema instead of tutting at you for using your phone, people will shush each other because they’ll think the film has started.
Of course, you can turn it down. What you can’t do, oddly, is set it to sRGB mode despite this being the default colour space used by almost every image, video and app. The 10bit IPS LCD covers more than 95 per cent of the bigger DCI P3 colour space used in the film and TV industry, according to our meter, and can do full justice to any HDR content you can find, with reasonable accuracy. For ordinary purposes it simply looks very good.
LG has also built in an exceptionally loud speaker.
