LG G7 ThinQ review – in pictures
A thoroughly different flagship phone, with unique extras that go beyond the gimmicky
TACTICAL MARVEL
You have to have some sympathy for the LG G7 ThinQ. Going up against the Samsung Galaxy S9 and iPhone X is like turning up to a paintball day and realising the other team has real guns. It has some interesting tactics to give itself a chance, though. And you know what? Most of them work pretty well. The LG G7 ThinQ has the audiophile-friendly quad-DAC seen in some previous LGs like the V30+. And while its back-rumbling BoomBox speaker feature seems a total gimmick, it’s almost bizarrely good. Add the wide-angle camera and a supernova 1000-nit screen and the LG G7 ThinQ starts to sound interesting. It doesn’t flatten the competition but, OnePlus 6 aside, offers better value than many top-end phones.
FAMILIAR DESIGN
Who knew it’d be so easy to get bored of glass and metal phones with amazing build quality? The LG G7 ThinQ is about the 347th phone this year to have such a design. Smoothly curved Gorilla Glass on the back slips almost seamlessly into aluminium, curving again into glass on the front. It’s comfortable – an expensive glass and metal pebble. Our blue version looks a little like the Honor 10, but larger and a little more laid-back. If the Honor 10 is Sunny Delight, this is orange juice. In a dim room it almost looks black, turning bright blue when it catches the light. It’s a very friendly size too, smaller than the HTC U12+ and OnePlus 6. In fact, friendly is the impression it leaves all-round, though, not “super-luxurious and expensive.”
HIDDEN DEPTHS
There are other sides to the hardware, though. The LG G7 ThinQ is water resistant to IP68, so it can take being dropped in water. There’s also a dedicated button on the left side that calls up the Google Assistant, so you don’t have to say the “Ok, Google” wake word anymore. Anyone who owns a Google Home knows how quickly that gets old. BoomBox is perhaps the most interesting hardware extra. I initially though this was a terrible idea: the back vibrates to resonate sound through the surface on which it sits. However, it actually works. Place the LG G7 on a surface happy to resonate and it dramatically increases the speaker’s soundstage and bass.
STRANGER SCREENS
The screen is a little unusual too. This is a sharp 6.1-inch, 3120 x 1440, 19:9 display with an LCD panel, rather than an OLED. However, it’s extremely bright, reaching almost 1000 nits using a boost mode. It’s a solid screen, and a great one among LCDs. But it’s actually the window dressing that makes the LG G7 ThinQ stand out. Many phones have a notch. Some let you hide it. But LG lets you dress it up in different clothes. LG calls this “Second Screen”. The LG G7 ThinQ’s notch can be replaced with a red or grey-to-black gradient or a rainbow one, and its edges can either be squared off, or tapered in to match the actual display contours. Want a notch? It’s there. Don’t want one? Let’s drape some colour there instead. The notch area is still used for notification icons, so the space is not wasted.
ANDROID, THE LG WAY
Fresh out of the box, the LG G7 ThinQ behaves more like an iPhone than an Android. There’s no apps menu. You just have homescreens. Dig deep enough into the Settings menu and you can add an apps menu, but it’s arranged in pages rather than a vertical scroll like that of a Pixel 2 or Galaxy S9. You have to accept the LG Android way. However, it’s not that hard to get on with. The LG G7 ThinQ runs well, and feels fast. After all, it’d be very bad news for LG if the G7 felt anything but super-quick. A Snapdragon 845 runs the show. And, as of June 2018 this is the fastest CPU you’ll find in an Android phone. Eight Kyro cores and an Adreno 630 CPU make this phone ready for anything. It breezes through high-end games and scores 8990 in Geekbench 4.
GOOD CAMERA, BUT NOT GREAT
Camera quality often separates the good from the great, and here you get a mixed bag. The LG G7 ThinQ has dual rear sensors, both with 16 megapixels. This second camera has a true wide-angle lens. It’s not just a digital effect, and it lets you fit more people, or more landscape, into an image. Like the rumbly speaker, this is something different. Most high-end phones have lenses that zoom in. This one zooms out. The LG G7 also has an AI mode. This scans through what the camera sees in real time, looking for objects and scene types. At one point it mistook a park bench for “ham” and seems to come up with some truly odd tags constantly, which – rather distractingly – appear on the display as you shoot.
BATTERY BLISS
The LG G7 ThinQ has one of the smaller batteries among top-end phones. It’s a 3000mAh unit, about as low capacity a phone of this size can use before you start wondering if its designers have started drinking at lunch time. However, its stamina is, surprisingly enough, perfectly decent. Every day I use the LG G7 I seem to end up with around 30% charge left when I set it to charge overnight. This isn’t a two-day phone. But given it has a 3000mAh cell, things could be a lot worse. The LG G7 comes with a fast charger, getting you up to 50% in 30 minutes. It supports wireless charging too, if you’re just too lazy to plug in a cable.
LG G7 THINQ VERDICT
The LG G7 ThinQ is one of the best ways to get a top-end phone that doesn’t cost so much it’ll make your bank account crumble to dust. And while from a distance its unique extras sound like gimmicks, they’re actually neat. Wide-angle camera? Great for holidays and big group photos. BoomBox rumble speaker? It actually works. 1000-nit screen? A killer extra for taking photos on sunny days. The camera isn’t close to the best thanks to its tendency to overexpose 24/7 and the new AI stuff is a bit rubbish. But when the Galaxy S9 is £140 more, the LG G7 looks like a good deal. You get an even better deal with the OnePlus 6, of course, but it doesn’t have the quirky extras that make the LG G7 different.
