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Have you ever been curious of how other less common mobile phones perform against the top brands ? Well, I have, and instead of iPhone, Samsung or Huawei, in this review, I will write on the LG G7 Phone instead, so read on if it makes you wonder how other brands are faring.
Hey so this is the brand-new LG G7 and as a long-term user of the G6, I’m pretty excited about this update. So I’ve been testing it for the last two weeks and here are my thoughts. I think it’s a great phone that will once again be pretty underappreciated. Okay so there are three things about the G7 that I think are fantastic. Five that are you know, good enough but not outstanding and only one that I straight-up dislike.
First this phone feels fantastic in hand. It feels more dense than previous LG phones. It is super comfortable to hold. It somehow miraculously isn’t too slippery and there’s attention to even the smallest details like nice clicky buttons and excellent vibration motor and this color. I love it. It’s a very understated dark blue in most situations but move it around a little and it turns into this beautiful light blue turquoise mix so the whole phone feels super premium. Also if you are an audiophile then this phone should be very high on your list. I’m not but even I can very very much appreciate the convenience of a headphone jack that just happens to output the best quality sound you will find on any consumer phone. LG’s signature Quad DAC and support for 3D sound to make this phone the pack leader.
The wide-angle camera is another feature that I find fantastic. It is much much much better than the one found on the G6. It is not quite as wide anymore but it is now actually usable in low-light and it barely distorts at all. Gone are the terrible lens flares, noise levels or lower, colors are better and it’s just better overall. It is still a step down in image quality from the primary camera as it lacks optimical image stabilization and only has an F 1.9 aperture, but it is a giant step forward.
I should about 30 to 40 percent of my photos using the wide-angle camera on both the G6 and the G7 so this upgrade is pretty substantial I think. Okay so these are all the things that I loved about this phone. Now let’s go through the long laundry list of features that I think are good but not outstanding. Starting with the screen, 99% of the time this is a fantastic screen. It’s super super bright I’ve never had any visibility issues. It is high resolution in 1440p. It has good colors, everything. I have one problem with it though. The blacks aren’t very black even for an IPS screen. They are less black than the ones that are on my G6. Usually this wouldn’t bother me too much but when trying to hide that notch on the top, which you can thankfully do, it becomes kind of visible, so the screen is good but not perfect.
The same goes for software. The skin is a slight refresh from what LG had on their previous phones. I mostly like the direction. Visually it is slightly updated and looks more consistent and modern. Performance has been very good and I have not had any lagging or any bugs in the system, so that’s encouraging. It also has a few really useful features like the ability to customize or hide the navigation bar which is really quite handy on a phone this tall and I also really like that you can customize the always-on display. You can put your own image there and have your quick controls without unlocking the phone. It’s really useful. LG did say that they open up a new software development center to speed up OS update,s but you know, they also have a very long and bad track record with OS updates. I mean my G6 still doesn’t run Oreo. So you know I’ll believe them when I see it. So software is better improved but still not the best of the best. The same for the camera. Now, I’ve already told you that I love the wide-angle camera and a quick plug here. If you follow me on Instagram and Twitter, you’ll actually see that I shoot photos with it all the time. The main optically stabilized 16 megapixel F 1.6 camera is also a big improvement compared to the G6, but I feel like while LG moved one step forward, the rest of the industry moved one and a half steps. So this is a very good camera but not the best of the best.
I found that daylight shots are plenty sharp and have good colors, dynamic range is good but could be even better with occasionally blown out highlights and lowlights shots are now much better than they were last year but not as amazing as those of the best competitors. Gone are the nasty lens flares of the G6 but there are funny artifacts every now and then, like these green reflections bouncing around here. Portrait mode is okay but again nothing breathtaking. The AI camera, well the best thing about it is that you can turn it off and manual mode is still present and I still think that LG does this better than anyone else. It works for both photos and videos, controls are well laid out and you have really advanced features. In photo mode, you can see a really helpful histogram and a level that shows you if you hold your phone straight. Focus peaking is available in both photo and video mode, and in video mode you can and not only see audio feedback, but you can actually control your microphones too. This is more controlled than some point-and-shoot cameras give you. So really good job on that LG. Also the selfie camera went from being straight garbage on the G6 to being very good on the G7. It’s wide enough to fit multiple people into your shots, works well even in terrible lighting and it’s just a pleasure to use. So cameras overall are a trade-off. The wide-angle camera is fantastic, so is the manual mode and the selfie shooter is now great too, while the main camera is good but not the best.
Finally on the medium list is the battery. So it’s a 3000 milliamp powers which for a phone of this category is very small. This is not an endurance champion but it’s also not bad. I usually get somewhere between four and a half to six and a half hours of screen on time. It lasted me a full day of moderate to heavy use on every single day, so you know it’s not great but it’s also much better than I expected. I think you’re starting to see a pattern here, so let’s move on to the one thing that I actually straight up with disliked.
This phone is super slippery on a table or any similar surface and we’ll simply slide off of it. While it is milspec certified so it should be more durable than most competitors, it’s still just glass on the front and glass on the back and it will break. Also in just two weeks the rear glass is already full of small scratches everywhere even though I didn’t drop, this I didn’t scratch, this nothing. I just don’t like fragile glass on glass phones, so thumbs down for that. Overall though there’s nothing else that’s straight out wrong with the phone. Cellular and Wi-Fi connections are excellent, it has bluetooth 5.0. Wireless and fast charging, it’s ip68 water-resistant and the list goes on. There’s just nothing missing here. If you just want to know if you’ll be happy picking up the LG G7, then my answer is probably yes, especially if you prefer audio quality and the really nice wide-angle camera over a best-in-class battery life. Especially if you wait at least two months, because two months from now this phone will probably cost something like five hundred dollars, at which point it will be a fantastic deal. Okay so what do you think about the G7? Share your views in the comment box below, and thank you for reading my review.