Gadgetory

hey it's Joshua Vergara what's going on everybody and this is the LG G seven thinkyou now while we were spending time with this phone in Korea we were told that think you even though it is officially part of the name of this device can be omitted in future correspondents so for now we're just going to continue calling this the LG G 7 the design of this device is like if AV 30 mixed together with a g6 in that you get the glossy backings with four different colors and you get a screen that is taller more than it is wide and that is because of a unique aspect ratio in this case 19 by 9 aspect ratio because of that notch at the top but the notch can also be customized because the notification areas on the sides can be made into either a black color effectively turning off the notch or you can add other colors and gradients to it to give it a little bit of extra Flair now this area is called the new second screen which is a little bit problematic because we remember the second screens from the v10 and the V 20 there were more functions on there including textual elements and notifications and that's a little bit different from what we're seeing here and that screen is an IPS LCD display that comes in a quiet HD resolution and the reason why LG stuck with IPS LCD for its construction is because of brightness in particular what you can do here is go to the brightness slider and hit the icon on the left and it will go into a boosted mode this super-bright display allows for 1000 nits of power coming right out of the LCD and it's really bright LG claims it is the brightest of any smartphone and it's obviously something you would want to use in situations like when you're standing outside in broad daylight you still get the volume rocker over on the side but now the power button that used to be part of the fingerprint reader on the back has been moved to the side as well you get a more conventional power button that most users were saying that they would prefer because having to reach around the device in order to wake the device was a little bit too cumbersome at least in terms of convenience you can use the power button on the side and double tap it to launch the camera but opposite that button is now a brand new addition in the AI key LG partnered up again very closely with Google to provide specific functionality for Google assistant which is this phone's AI assistant of choice the button allows for full all over the way that Google assistant interacts with the user you can press the button and it will do the same thing that it does when you hold the home button on any Android device double tap the AI key and you can open up Google lands and then finally you can press and hold on that button in order to talk to Google assistant like you would a walkie-talkie this seems like a simple function but it might be the most significant change to the way that assistant works the only other place that we've seen this kind of functionality is in the pixel buds where you can actually dictate what kind of voice string goes to Google assistant rather than it trying to figure out when you stopped talking and as we all know when Google assistant tries to recognize when you are speaking sometimes it doesn't do a good job of it of course that's only one layer to the assistant experience as LG is trying to upgrade its software with more AI capabilities Google assistant is obviously going to be one main way of doing it but of course the smart thing queue connection to their iot platform is also important and then finally a smart bulletin which is a second home screen over on the left a little bit like Bixby or Google now provides some contextual cards so that you have information for a number of different situations and powering all of this are what you would expect from a high powered device the Snapdragon 845 comes with two different RAM and ROM configurations you can get four or six gigabytes of RAM and 64 gigabytes or 128 gigabytes of on-board storage depending on what version of the phone you get a 3000 milliamp hour battery might seem like a little bit on the low side but we'll reserve judgment on the battery life until we get our review unit and then all the bits and pieces you would want in this phone are there including the headphone jack and the audio experience continues to be very important to LG boombox sound is a unique take on the speaker sharing experience as the entire back portion of the phone has been made into the sound chamber in a bit of an oversimplified way you can look at it as the back cover and the space between hits and everything it protects as a resonance area when you have audio at a loud volume you can feel the entire back vibrate and then you can put the phone down on a number of materials and that's when the magic happens for the most part this works best with a hollowed out container like a cardboard box or we even put this phone on a gift are to see how it would sound from there and the vibration of the bag actually makes that hollowed-out container amplify the sound for a much richer experience it's a striking difference between this phone and any other phone that we tested and the headphone jack still has the quad DAC but also now has the DTS x3d standard tuned in this is basically a standard for surround sound so you can cater the soundstage to your liking but I will tell you this that quad DAC returning is also great and anybody who misses their headphone jacks can look to the g7 as a wonderful audiophile device and if you pair the quad DAC with active noise-cancelling it's one hell of a combination now we can finally talk about the camera LG's most unique and simultaneously also most polarizing feature in its phones let's start off with some great news the front-facing camera is finally a viable shooter an upgrade from 5 megapixels in the V 32 a megapixels now is not the only change as the tuning allows for better sharpness and it doesn't over soft in a lot of the detail there's even a bit of a portrait like mode where you can add okay background effects granted portrait modes tend to take advantage of a dual lens setup but for the g7 LG continues the tradition of providing a wide-angle secondary Lance it's still great to use for wide shots and even for video especially for situations like vlogging and you get a 107 degree field of view which helps correct the distortion on the sides without sacrificing much of the wide view without a telephoto lens the portrait mode on the LG g7 remains the same focal length as the main camera so you don't have the picture actually zooming into the subject and you wouldn't have to move backwards in order to fit your subject into the frame now speaking of the cutout we did have some issues where people with a lot of hair or my glasses for example we're mistaken for of the cutout and we're blurred out but again we're gonna reserve judgment until the software which was very pre-production for this camera gets to its final version in our final unit as far as low-light photography goes LG took two pixel binding as their solution 16 megapixels is what you get no matter which lens you're using on the rear but they can be in groups of four which results in a four megapixel image where those groups flood in more light to the sensor and of course video is still a big deal with the g7 as it retains the manual movie controls and also send a video on top of audio capture capabilities that were in the V 30 and finally to round out the camera experience is another injection of artificial intelligence LG added a I cam to its LG v 30s thinkyou so you might be familiar with what we call the tag cloud the cloud is a flurry of words that when a eye is on shows the camera is trying to recognize what object or subject is pointing at for example point the camera at some Korean barbecue and once it figures out it is food it is looking at the camera will up the saturation and try to give you a better foodie shot now the tag cloud might be a little polarizing for some as they don't really want to know that the cameras having trouble trying to recognize things but for the most part its final decision is pretty accurate at least in my case when I was using the front-facing camera with a I cam I'm clearly not a cauliflower even though that word came up at one point in the cloud but its final decision was that that was one person and then it gave me settings for a selfie and so there you have it the LG G 7 what LG proves every year is that it takes into proper consideration the key aspects of a smartphone that others might be taking for granted like the headphone jack and then LG keeps up with some of the trends and you can see that in the notch right now but in this particular phone LG continues also the tradition of thinking outside of the box with things like boombox sound and also even that AI key on the side which seems simple but can prove very useful we're really excited to get our hands on a review unit and we will see how the g7 fares when we get it the full review treatment until then let us know how you feel about the LG G 7 in the comments down below and check out all of the other coverage we have about this phone here at Android authority com don't forget to subscribe to our channel if you haven't already and hit the bell on the side so you can keep up with everything that we you on this YouTube channel then when you're done with all of that head over to Andrew authority comm where we are of course your source for all things Android