LG Velvet
Luxury on the outside, less so on the inside.
Look at the LG Velvet front-on and you could mistake it for a $1,000-plus phone. Its front glass curves at the sides, the screen is big, and there are no little plastic slivers between the glass and metal parts. That can cheapen the look of a phone a little.
There’s even more character than some, as the metal sides form more prominent lips at the corners. The LG Velvet looks and feels expensive from the front, although does not have the surround-free appearance of a Samsung Galaxy S20 family phone.
But the back? It is relatively plain, with a semi mirrored glossy finish. There’s no instantly recognisable camera surround, no eye-catching light reactive layer below the glass.
However, this is likely a choice based on the ‘look’ LG wants for the Velvet. And if you want colour, you can get it. The Velvet comes in low-key white and black (ish), as well as green and ‘illusion sunset’, a red-yellow gradient with the polarising punch you might expect from Huawei or Honor.
A headphone jack is one of the unusual benefits of the LG Velvet. Few high-end phones have them. This one does.
The LG Velvet’s screen is very tall, with an almost Sony Xperia 1 II-like 20.5:1 aspect ratio, and it has a teardrop notch.
This notch snips out more of the screen than some punch holes, but the display’s sheer height makes this a non-issue. Watch Selling Sunset or Below Deck on Netflix and you can either see the standard 16:9 image with black bars to the left and right, or fill the display up to the start of the notch.
We get a 48-megapixel primary camera, an 8-megapixel ultra-wide and a 5-megapixel depth sensor.
Not only is there a big drop in quality between the primary and secondary cameras, the main one isn’t a jaw-dropper either. The LG Velvet uses the Samsung GM2, a 48MP sensor, with an f/1.8 lens.
It is easy to sneer at a fairly pricey phone that uses a midrange CPU like the Snapdragon 765G, but the difference in real-world performance between this and the Snapdragon 865 is often very minor. App loads are near-instant and the 8GB of RAM offers plenty of scope for keeping apps in a parked state rather than closing them fully.
We find the OnePlus 8 feels slightly nippier than the LG Velvet day-to-day, but this is likely as much because it has a quicker fingerprint scanner and a 90Hz screen as the difference in processor power.
There is still a huge gulf in power when you put the LG Velvet to the test, though.
The LG Velvet is a mid-range 5G phone that costs a little too much, even compared to LG’s high-end phones of the last year or two. Its lower power chipset does not feel a huge step down, but the rear camera array is not as versatile as we would hope for at the price. Andrew Williams