LG G7 ThinQ review
A reasonable, not revolutionary, smartphone upgradecertainly outstanding information about the brand new LG G7 Thinq by trending technologies Smartphone
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The LG G7 ThinQ is a completely unsurprising, risk-averse smartphone that's meant to be smart, not flashy. It has an AI-powered camera, loud 'Boombox' speaker, and a bright 6.1-inch display. It's shaping up to be a reasonable, but not monumental upgrade over the LG G6.
FOR
Large display can get very bright
Camera takes wide-angle photos
Boombox speaker gets loud
AGAINST
Smaller battery capacity
LCD has drawbacks vs LED
Few revolutionary features
Update: New LG G7 ThinQ testing has been done, and we know more about when it'll be available to buy in the US. We've added the new details to our ongoing G7 review. But we've held off on scoring this review simply because there's no price or and the software isn't final.
The G7 ThinQ is LG’s new Android phone, touting a Super Bright LCD display that’s view in direct sunlight – which is ironic because the rest of this phone has a hard time standing out.
Price and release date
The so-far-unknown price is slated to be cheaper than the iPhone X
Release date is mid-May for Korea and June for other regions
The LG G7 ThinQ is destined for Korea first in mid-May, about two weeks after its May 2 launch; LG always brings its flagship phone to its home territory first.
Its US release date slated for June 1 on most American carriers: Verizon, Sprint and T-Mobile. AT&T is promising an exclusive LG phone in the next few months, skipping over the LG G7 for its customers. The phone will also likely launch during June in the UK and Australia.
How much will the LG G7 cost? There’s no confirmed price just yet, but LG has hinted that it’ll cost less than other flagship smartphones. In other words, while it’s rumored to carry a higher price than the G6, with speculation landing at around $740 (£720, AU$1,120), it won’t be as expensive as the iPhone X.
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6.1-inch Super Bright LCD display makes it easier to see your phone screen outdoors
Notch design makes way for status icon-filled ‘New Second Screen’
Sleep/wake button moved to the side, fingerprint sensor remains on back
Glass back, 3.5mm headphone and IP69 water-resistance
The LG G7's design puts an emphasis on its 6.1-inch LCD screen, which takes up nearly the entire front of the device, save for a notch at the top and a small chin bezel at the bottom. Its clean-looking unique body glass and all-screen aesthetic are a big upgrade over the fractured metal LG G5 look two years ago, even if this means you have to forgo a replaceable battery.
The notch left and right sides can be hidden in black or accentuated with various colors and gradients. Either way, it's extra screen space for status icons, the time and the battery life percentage.
LG calls the top screen space to the left and right of the notch its ‘New Second Screen’ – it’s not. At least not like it was on the LG V10 and LG V20 second screen which showed detailed notifications. This is simply where the time, battery life percentage, and small notification icons live.
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Dual-lens 16MP rear camera, one with an ultra-wide field of view
AI software tries to understand subject and adapts the settings
Super Bright Camera offers 4x the brightness at a quarter the resolution
8MP front-facing camera is a big improvement over past LG phones
LG G7 ThinQ brings impressive specs to its camera hardware and combines it with AI software in an effort to actually understand what’s in front of you. The machine learning tech categorizes subjects into 19 different shooting modes, tweaking colors and brightness along the way.
The dual-lens camera setup allows for normal photos with a better aperture and ultra-wide photos.
Launching the AI camera software triggers a flurry of guesses as to what the subject is: person, animal, food, etc. It gets even more granular with these details, trying to guess specific product names and animal species, for example. Sometimes it’s right and adjusts the camera settings accordingly; sometimes it’s way off and a bit comical. It’s hard not to laugh when the AI camera guesses that your meat-filled sandwich is a poodle. At least we hope it was wrong.
The Super Bright Camera is more precise, automatically detecting low-light situations and camping up the brightness by four times compared to conventional pictures, and even twice as bright as the LG V30S ThinQ ‘Bright Mode’. The trade-off here is that photos are going to be 4MP, and 4K UHD video is cut down to 1080p. The Huawei P20 Pro does something similar with its 40MP camera, outputting 10MP photos. (See the math? Always divide the photo or video resolution by four.)
Tricks like AI-powered subject detection and Super Bright Camera mode keep LG in the best camera phone title hunt.
The 16MP dual-lens camera – with an impressively fast f/1.6 normal lens and a f/1.9 wide-angle lens – uses a pair of Sony IMX 351 camera sensors measuring 1/3.1 inches. This is smaller than the average camera sensor of a flagship phone (The S9 camera has a 1/2.55-inch sensor and the Pixel 2 has a 1/2.6-inch sensor). LG says it doesn’t need larger sensors to achieve impressive results. We'll be the judge of that soon.
We still have to evaluate the final camera software to see if LG is right about its smaller rear camera sensors. But we can already tell that the 8MP front-facing camera is vastly improved over prior LG phones, and that we like the wide-angle rear shooter, which captures more of what’s in front of us thanks to a field of view of 107 degrees; a typical camera lens has a field of view of 71 degrees. And interestingly, the LG G7’s portrait mode doesn’t crop in on the normal frame because of this dual-lens array. That’s helpful when framing up bokeh-rich portrait photos.
Boombox speaker
Loud Boombox speaker provides deep bass
DTS:X 3D Sound and 32-bit WiFi Quad DAC
The G7 ThinQ includes what LG calls a Boombox speaker, and it’s plenty loud. It uses the entire phone to pump out rich bass, and it reverb for an even more powerful sound when resting on a table or, even better, a hollow wooden box. There’s a noticeable difference when it sits next to the Samsung Galaxy S9 playing the same song, in our early tests.
Lay the phone against a hallow wooden box and you'll hear much louder sound from the reverberating speaker.
The phone is filled with some of the best audio specs, too, including DTS:X 3D Sound through any wired headphones, and a 32-bit WiFi Quad DAC with 50% reduced noise. You’re going to be able to hear the difference if you’re an audiophile. The one problem we see is that this phone has a single bottom-firing speaker, so it’s too easy to cover up the speaker grille when holding the phone and watching a YouTube video in landscape mode.
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Flagship-level Snapdragon 845 chipset, 4GB of RAM, 64GB of storage
6GB of RAM and 128GB variant available, but availability is a mystery
Android 8.0 Oreo with LG software skin and Smart Bulletin
With the LG G7 ThinQ, LG isn’t making the same mistake it made with the G6, which launched with the Snapdragon 821 chipset when other phones were being outfitted with the Snapdragon 835. If a company is going to launch a flagship, it needs the latest flagship-level specs.
The LG G7 is going to be fast, but unlikely to be the fastest phone available.
That’s why the LG G7 is powered by this year’s flagship smartphone chip, the Snapdragon 845, and it’s coupled with 4GB of RAM, 64GB of internal storage, and a microSD card slot for expandable storage. All of this means the LG G7 is going to be fast enough to compete in 2018.
Battery life
3,000mAh battery is smaller than the V30 3,300mAh capacity
Should still provide all-day battery life thanks to software trick
Quick Charge 3.0 wired charging as well as wireless charging
Like the performance stats, we’re still waiting to do more in-depth tests to tell you how the LG G7 ThinQ does when it comes to battery longevity. We do have some clues, however.
With an LCD and a smaller battery, we're going to take a very close look at the battery performance in the final review.
The G7 ThinQ has a 3,000mAh battery capacity, which is smaller than the LG V30’s 3,300mAh battery size. This is a compromise to maintain the phone’s dimensions, according to LG, even though the new phone it’s slightly thicker than the V30. The good news? We’re still likely in for all-day battery life, with advanced software tricks making up for the diminished capacity.
We’ll soon be putting the battery life to the test, as well as the re-charge speeds. The G7 uses USB-C and officially supports Quick Charge 3.0 and wireless charging. Unofficially, it supports Quick Charge 4.0 – if you can find a charger out there.
Early verdict
The LG G7 ThinQ is a completely unsurprising, risk-averse smartphone, returning the power button to the side where it belongs and giving us another all-screen display, enveloped by a typical glass body. It even rides the popular notch trend that’s prevalent among almost all new Android phones right now.
The LG G7 ThinQ gets bright, ideal for direct sunlight. But it doesn't have too many hallmark features. It's good at the basics.
Its 6.1-inch display gets extremely bright, and its single speaker is plenty loud. The rest of the big highlights are left up to AI software, most notably the 16MP dual-lens rear and 8MP front-facing camera. They’re shaping up to be at least competitive, even if the machine learning prowess isn’t completely convincing.
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