LG new G8 ThinkQ: Just a refashioned G7 ThinQ

Z Camera multi-sensor system can unlock the phone securely using your face or hand’s vein structure.

(Web Desk) – LG released its new flagship today, the G8 ThinQ to provide the LG users up-to-date features in this competitive phone era. LG G8 ThinQ comes with pre-installed Android Pie 9.0 which houses 6GB of RAM with latest Snapdragon 855 processor.

According to The Verge, It has a sharp 6.1-inch OLED display, a screen-rattling loudspeaker, and a headphone jack bolstered by a Quad DAC that sounds incredible with wired headphones. The G8 also offers wireless charging, supports microSD storage, and has an IP68 rating against water and dust ingress.

Populated by a new Z Camera multi-sensor system, it can unlock the phone securely using your face or your hand’s vein structure. Z Camera also allows for the phone’s other big feature, Air Motion, which lets you use hand gestures to, say, raise the volume or pause a song in Spotify, without touching the G8.

Sources: Cnet.com

Digging deeper into the G8’s unique features, its notch houses an 8-megapixel selfie camera, a Time of Flight (ToF) sensor, and an infrared emitter. Once the object or person in the frame is covered in infrared light, the ToF sensor can detect its depth, which is critical for LG’s new features, Face Unlock and

Hand ID. Face Unlock, as you might expect, gathers a 3D scan of your face angled in different ways, and it won’t unlock with a 2D image.

Sources: Cnet.com

Face Unlock is definitely fast and convenient enough. Hand ID unlocks your phone when it authenticates the unique vein layout in your palm above the Z

Camera, and LG notes that this is a less secure method of protecting your phone.

Some retailers are offering the G8 for $699 unlocked for use with any GSM or CDMA carrier, and if you’re able to find it for this price, you’ll get a lot of phone for your money.

Relative to the 2018 LG G7, the G8 feels more weighty and substantial, but unless you’re picking apart a spec sheet, you might not notice any differences.

Sources: Cnet.com

The nicest upgrade is the fact that the rear cameras now sit under the same piece of glass covering the rear of the phone, generating no camera bump or disturbance at all. Compared to its Android contemporaries, the G8 is one of the smaller flagships on the market, and it should appeal to people who findt he Plus models from other manufacturers to be too big to handle.

The 3,500mAh battery is a sizeable increase over the G7’s 3,000mAh, and it’s more than you’ll find in the Samsung Galaxy S10 or S10E.

LG opted to swap the bright IPS LCD used in the G7 for an OLED display, which gives it deeper blacks and better contrast. The company also got rid of the earpiece, instead utilizing a piezoelectric speaker behind the screen to create sound with vibrations from the phone’s frame. This works well in quiet settings, and when paired with its loudspeaker, it creates a somewhat convincing stereo effect. But if you take a call on a windy day or in a busy restaurant, it is far too weak to hear clearly.

LG also uses the Z Camera to add bokeh to selfie portraits, but that really isn’t much of an improvement. Even the Google Pixel 2’s single-lens computational bokeh worked more effectively than LG’s bespoke hardware.

Good shots are possible even at night, though LG’s Night view doesn’t hold a candle to the Huawei P30 Pro’s low-light capabilities or the Pixel’s Night Sight.

Like last year’s phone, the G8 is still slow to capture, which leads to lots of blurry photos. Additionally, it has a hard time getting skin tones right, portrait shots have inconsistent bokeh, and the auto-exposure can be all over the place.

LG was able to patch previous phones with AI features that were said to enhance low-light performance, so I’m interested to see if LG could improve the state of things here. But when it comes to LG and delivering software when a device needs it the most, I’m not hopeful.

You can get good results with the manual mode, which lets you seize control over the usual variables like shutter speed and ISO, and the ultra-wide angle shots are always fun to snap.

Outside of LG’s own sphere of design, other phones are going all in on new hardware features like hole-punch cameras and in-display fingerprint sensors.

It’s not a big strike against the G8 that it doesn’t have these novelties, especially since we found the in-display fingerprint sensor in the Samsung Galaxy

S10 Plus to be slow compared to traditional fingerprint sensors. But by comparison, the G8’s design is basically a repeat of last year’s LG G7 ThinQ, and sitting still in the smartphone market makes it an even harder sell.

Of course, some mainstays from past LG phones are a good thing. Its best-in-class haptics motor, for example, is always welcome to the party.

More phones are beginning to take haptic feedback seriously, providing more nuanced vibrations than bleary buzzes, and LG still leads the pack of Android phone makers. The haptics almost purr when you navigate the G8. Whether you’re running through basic tasks, like texting, or scrolling through your list of opened apps using Android 9 Pie’s pill-shaped home button, expressive haptics make bland tasks a little more fun.

There’s a Quad DAC built-in headphone jack that dramatically improves the sound quality with wired headphones. It’s not activated by default.

The additional DTS: X virtual surround sound effect adds a bit more attack to your tracks if you want a fuller, bass-heavy sound.

LG usually overhauls its G-series each year, but comparing it to Apple’s smartphone naming conventions, the G8 is more of an “S” upgrade to the G7 ThinQ. Many things about it are the same, but there are a few improvements that might interest you. Most S-year phones are worth checking out because, as Dieter Bohn said in his review of the Pixel 3, “It’s better to be on the S-cycle: you get a faster phone, better camera, and the fixes that come after a year with the original design.”

But aside from improved specs, the things that changed in the G8 ThinQ are things that I think most users can carry on without.