LG G7 ThinQ
A REASONABLE BUT NOT REVOLUTIONARY SMARTPHONE UPGRADE
THE G7 THINQ, LG’s best phone in years, touts a ‘Super Bright’ LCD that’s viewable in direct sunlight, which is ironic because the rest of it has a hard time standing out. It’s a reasonable, but not significant upgrade over last year’s LG G6, with a larger 6.1-inch all-screen display, AI-enhanced cameras, a loud ‘Boombox Speaker’, a faster chipset and Google’s Android 8.0 Oreo software out of the box. LG is emphasising that this is a smart, not flashy, phone and is determined to push AI onto all of its smart devices. The execution on this new ThinQ phone is, thankfully, a little more practical than its nomenclature.
SUPER BRIGHT
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 unibody glass and all-screen aesthetic are a big upgrade over the fractured metal LG G5 look from two years ago. 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, which showed detailed notifications. This is simply where the time, battery life and small notification icons live.
Why LCD? LG likes to boast that its entire display can get very bright — maxing out at 1,000 nits. This makes it ideal for outdoor use when a normal smartphone peaks at 500 or maybe 600 nits. LG calls this its ‘Super Bright Display’, and says it’s 30% more energy efficient in this mode versus the LG G6 screen. The Super Bright Display mode lasts for three minutes, a cap meant to save your battery and not overheat the device. That was just enough time to read messages on our phone screen while walking outdoors in direct sunlight in our preliminary testing.
The LG G7 ThinQ has an easy-to-reach fingerprint sensor on back, just below a vertically stacked dual-lens rear camera. This sensor pad doesn’t click in to double as a sleep/wake button, like on other recent LG devices. LG’s design team has returned the power to the right side of the phone — where it belongs. They’ve clearly received our letters.
There is one extra button, too: the new dedicated AI button that sits on left side of the metal frame. More than a few times, we mistook it for the volume down key. A single press launches Google Assistant, a double press launches you straight into Google Lens, and a long press takes you straight into voice commands with Assistant.
AI-POWERED CAMERAS
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 categorises subjects into 19 different shooting modes, tweaking colours and brightness along the way.
Launching the AI camera software triggers a flurry of guesses as to what the subject is: person, animal, food and so on. 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 amping up the brightness by four times compared to conventional pictures. The trade-off is that photos are going to be 4MP, and 4K UHD video is cut down to just 1080p.
IT’S HARD NOT TO LAUGH WHEN THE AI CAMERA GUESSES THAT YOUR MEAT-FILLED SANDWICH IS A POODLE.
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 a smaller-than-average camera sensor for a flagship phone. LG says it doesn’t need larger sensors to achieve impressive results, but our side-by-side tests beg to differ. LG has a really great camera — it’s just not as good as its chief competitors. However, it can take wide-angle photos. We’re able to capture more of what’s in front of us, thanks to the 107° field of view (FoV) of the second rear lens; a typical camera lens has a field of view of 71°. We only wish this wider camera also had the optical image stabilisation that is on the main camera. The 8MP front-facing camera is vastly improved over prior LG phones, too.
Video is another small highlight. It’s able record 4K — this time with HDR — and uses LG’s cinematic tools. It was fun testing the G7’s ability to slowly and smoothly zoom into any part of the screen, not just the centre in a jerky motion like on every other phone. You’ll also find video can record at 240fps in 720p for slow motion.
SPECS AND GUTS
The G7 ThinQ includes what LG calls a Boombox speaker, and it’s plenty loud, although it’s obviously not as powerful as a Bluetooth speaker. The phone boasts some of the best audio specs, including DTS:X 3D Sound through any wired headphones, and a 32-bit HiFi Quad DAC with 50% reduced noise. You’re going to be able to hear the difference if you’re an audiophile.
The LG G7 is powered by this year’s flagship smartphone chip, Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 845, and it’s coupled with 4GB of RAM, 64GB of internal storage, and a microSD card slot for expandable storage. It’s just shy of the fastest performers, too, and only because many phones, including the Samsung Galaxy S9 Plus, are packing in 6GB of RAM. It’ll be plenty fast for most people. There is a version of the G7 with 6GB of RAM and 128GB of internal storage, but LG hasn’t yet revealed where that’s destined to launch.
It also has the latest operating system update, care of Android Oreo. The actual software doesn’t appear to be all that different from previous LG phones, down to the leftmost menu being dedicated to the familiar LG’s Smart Bulletin interface.
The biggest software perk has yet to be realised: LG promises that it’ll be better at rolling out software updates. The G7 isn’t part of the special Android P beta, but we’re hopeful it won’t take almost a year to get this new version of Google’s operating system when it does launch.
The ThinQ has a 3,000mAh battery. This is a compromise to maintain the phone’s svelte dimensions, according to LG. The good news is: we still managed to get it to last all day. We ran a 90-minute looped HD video at full charge and, by the end, we were down to 84% battery life. The S9 Plus, with a larger 3,500mAh battery but a tad bigger 6.2-inch screen, dropped down to 87% in comparison.
The G7 uses USB-C and officially supports QuickCharge 3.0 and wireless charging. It unofficially supports QuickCharge 4.0 — if you can find a charger out there. With the QuickCharge 3.0 charger included in the box, the G7 was one of the fastest to recharge in our tests — we reached a 100% charge in just 100 minutes.
TO CUT A LONG STORY SHORT...
The LG G7 ThinQ is an unsurprising, risk-averse device, returning the power button to the side where it belongs and giving us another all-screen display, enveloped by a typical glass body. The big highlights are left up to AI software, most notably the 16MP dual-lens rear and 8MP front-facing camera.
Here, the G7 is competitive, even if it’s shy of the best camera phone quality and its machine learning prowess isn’t completely convincing. It’s not better than the Google Pixel 2, Google Pixel 2 XL, or Samsung Galaxy S9 and S9 Plus at capturing images — most due to LG’s smaller camera sensor size — but it’s still a step up for LG, and this is one of the only phones with a wide-angle camera. It’s this feature that LG should trumpet, in our opinions, not software tricks.
The G7 ThinQ may be LG’s best flagship in years if all you care about are the basics and don’t completely baulk at the price.