24 LG G7 Thinq
Classy phone looks on the bright side
It’s time 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 selling for £599, £100 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).
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 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 £130 cheaper. Even so, the G7 is a great buy for everything that it offers.
SPECIFICATIONS
6.1in 3120x1440-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 www.snipca.com/28302
VERDICT: This isn’t the most exciting phone, but a full set of genuinely useful features at a fair price is the kind of innovation we like ★★★★★ ALTERNATIVE: Oneplus 6 £469 No ultra-brightness or wide-angle camera, but with the same processor and storage this is very good value
Aside from a few gimmicks, this has everything you need and looks great