Gadgetory

hey everybody Jimmy westenberg here with Android authority and this is the new LG g8 thank you it's LG's flagship phone for 2019 and on the surface it's really great but it does have some kind of gimmicky features that make me kind of question what LG's point is with this phone so let's dive right in okay so at first glance the LG G 8 looks a lot like the g7 from last year and I don't think that's great because the g7 was already a little generic looking but LG did refine it to make it feel better the first thing you notice when you pick up the g8 is that it's a little bit thicker and that's to compensate for the bigger battery which is also a plus and I wish more manufacturers who would make their phones thicker so their batteries last longer I've been able to make the LG G 8 last me all day on a single charge I'm only getting like four hours of screen on time but that's also with streaming a lot of podcasts so that's not going to count towards it if you do end up switching the display resolution to quad HD instead of the out-of-the-box Full HD your battery is going to drastically decrease because this is an LG phone it has all the extras that you'd expect it has a headphone jack down here which is also equipped with a quad DAC it also has an IP 68 water resistance rating handy Google Assistant button on the on the side which I actually use quite a bit and it also has wireless charging now on the front of the phone it also does look a little bit more modern than the LG G seven did for two reasons first is that LG kind of made the sides curved around to make it feel a lot easier to hold and and less sharp I guess when you're swiping around and also because this is the very first G Series phone with an OLED display and I know what you're thinking LG has gotten in trouble for OLED displays in the past for not being great or at least less good than Samsung's displays but this time around the OLED screen is actually really nice colors are really accurate and you can kind of tune it to your liking also on the front of this display you'll notice a little notch at the top and honestly it doesn't really get in the way I don't mind it and for a couple days of using this phone I completely forgot about it but you'll notice inside that notch there's a front-facing camera and two other little sensors but there's no ear receiver and that's because LG implemented something called a crystal sound OLED display and I actually really like it it produces good sound and you don't really have to worry about holding the phone up to your ear when you're on a phone call and like putting your ear in a specific place this year you can actually like cover up the speakers on the very bottom and still like hear sound coming from the display it's actually really nice one of the great things LG has been doing with the G Series is implementing this feature called boombox and it basically uses the inside of the phone as a resonance chamber to produce better fuller audio the problem is the LG G 8 is one of the slipperiest phones I've ever used and because the boombox speakers vibrate the phone so much when you put it down on a table or something and it doesn't have a case it just vibrates and moves so much actually right when I got this I put it on a stool a wooden stool and I received a phone call and just from the vibration it slipped off the stool so if you buy this phone buy a case save yourself a bunch of money the LG GA is a flagship phone and it has the flagship specs to back it up it has the latest Snapdragon processor it has six gigabytes of RAM and I know what you're thinking other companies are putting in eight gigabytes and sometimes even twelve gigabytes of RAM but I haven't had the g8 slow down on me once no matter what you're doing on the phone whether you're gaming or just swiping through social media or whatever I don't think you'll have a problem with performance and speaking of swiping through your phone LG's software is actually pretty good it's very minimal LG's using a lot of Google Apps instead of replacing it with their own stuff and I quite like that it's nice looking at a phone and not seeing a ton of duplicate apps now there are some but not as many as you'd think now I do have one little pet peeve and I know this is just a very personal issue but I really don't like the app drawer on this phone it gets so annoying every time you download a new app you have to like Reese sort it alphabetically otherwise the new apps just go to the back of the list and when you delete an app from the grid it just kind of remains this open spot it's really weird around back the lgj has a dual camera setup and the main sensor is 12 megapixels and it has bigger pixel sizes this year so low-light photography should be better the secondary camera is a wide-angle sensor 16 megapixels and it has a 107 degree field of view and this is pretty much the same wide-angle sensor we got last year with the g7 and I really like it actually you can zoom out of photos pretty wide and you don't see much distortion in the photos like you do with some of the new Samsung phones overall picture quality is good not great I think LG's a little bit behind the competition at this point now don't get me wrong I really do like this wide angle sensor but image is taken with the 12 megapixel sensor are just kind of lacking in detail everything I take is a little bit blurry and out of focus and that's even with my arms like completely still I found images to be just the right amount of saturation but LG's noise reduction is a little bit too over aggressive it struggles in high contrast situations in some of the camera samples you can see here a lot of the highlights are blown out LG also threw in a night mode with this camera it's called night view and it does an okay job at making everything a little bit easier to see in low lighting conditions I don't think it's anywhere near Google pixels night sight but it's decent the LG G 8 is also one of the first phones to feature portrait video mode and it sounds cool in theory but I don't think it works well in practice like at all basically the dual camera system on the back can attempt at least to separate the subject from the background but this doesn't really work well for video every time I've taken a video of my dog or somebody walking around it just kind of looks like it's constantly trying to catch up with the subject and the whole video just looked weird on the front there's an 8 megapixel selfie camera and it also does okay it has to have really good lighting conditions to get the skin tones right and I just feel like the skin tones that it does get right it just kind of overly softens everything and it makes it look like there's a beauty mode turned on when there actually isn't right next to that 8 megapixel selfie shooter are two extra sensors there's an IR illuminator and time-of-flight sensor and LG calls this set of the Z camera and basically what this does is is it enables you to interact with your phone in different ways and more secure ways for starters you can use a 3d face unlock feature that is way more secure than some other phones out there you probably won't be able to fool the g8 with just a photo of yourself like you can with some phones here's where it gets really weird this whole front-facing camera setup also allows you to use something called hand ID and basically this records an image of the hemoglobin levels in your hand and you can use that as another way to unlock your phone so you're probably wondering to yourself why would you ever want to unlock your phone like that you have to touch it anyway to interact with it so why not just use the fingerprint sensor well let's say your hands are dirty or something and you're baking bread in the kitchen and you don't want to wash off your hands you can actually unlock your phone with just your hand and then you can control your phone with your hand as well so we're gonna do a demonstration for you here we haven't been able to get the hand ID feature to work when we hold the phone in our hand so in this case we're gonna put it down on a table so all you do is you hold your hand over the camera and it should recognize me sometimes it doesn't like to there we go now we're in okay so you see there's this little green and purple bar up here that means it's searching for your hand and once you see that you kind of make this claw shape with your hand it's a little awkward you can see a little digital version of my hand on here it's kind of cool so these are two different shortcuts that I've set up YouTube and Google assistant and if I want to do assistant and do a voice command just kind of move my hand over and it starts listening to me this is pretty much the only feature I found that works that I that I would want to use but let's try YouTube because that's what LG uses and a lot of its examples so we'll get the feature to work again and move over to YouTube and do it again to press play they could you volume to just kind of twist your hand now in my testing this has been very hit-or-miss and when it misses it's really frustrating and honestly you'll just want to use your hands with your phone just like you normally would who is the LGG eight four and should you buy it to be honest I really can't say who this is for because it seems like there are so many other great phones on the market at this price point that the LGG eight just kind of gets overshadowed don't get me wrong I do like this phone a lot it's a good phone at everything that you would expect it to be good at it's good at it has a great screen it has good audio it has a bunch of extras that a lot of people are after but I think LG is focusing in the wrong areas now it's dual camera system is kind of a step behind the competition it's nowhere near pixel three level and it's not even up to the Galaxy S ten level and that's really too bad because this is a good phone it's just priced a little too high it launches this week for eight hundred and twenty dollars in the US and I think it's a little too high of an asking price for what you get here especially when there are things like the pixel 3 and the Galaxy S 10 out on the market right now so I want to know what you think about the LG G 8 would you buy it and do you think it's better than say the galaxy s 10 be sure to leave a comment below and let me know what you think and give this video a thumbs up if you liked it subscribe to our channel if you haven't already and we have a ton of other camera samples and performance benchmarks and everything you could ever want to know about this phone in our full review linked in the description all right thanks for watching see you in the next one