Gadgetory

LG brought me to New York City to tear down their brand-new LG and v30 the camera hardware in this thing could quite possibly be the best in the world at the moment before I take a look at the inside let's see what the footage looks like from the outside the coolest thing about this phone in my opinion is the camera the hardware underneath the little glass lens is pretty amazing and I'll explain why but first we have to get to it this pre-production version of the LGV 30 is a super sleek looking phone it has the metal body bezel is OLED display and the full curved Gorilla Glass 5 on the front and the back one cool thing with the curve though is that the glass is curved but not so much the display I find when using my curved the Galaxy s8 without a case the palm of my hand causes phantom touches to the screen since it wraps around the edge of the phone but the LG v30 screen is all on the front not wrapping around the edge so hopefully we won't have that same phantom touch issue getting inside the phone is pretty straightforward the LG v 30 is ip68 water-resistant one step above the ip67 water-resistant rating of the iPhone 7 I always enjoy pointing that out heat is our best friend during the glass removal warming up the phone and tells just barely too hot to touch and then using a large suction cup to lift up and decrease the tension on the surface of the glass so I can slip my thin metal pry tool between the edge of the glass and the metal frame of the phone slicing through the adhesive all the way around the underside of that glass layer this adhesive is the type that hardens again when it's cooled down so about every 30 or 40 seconds I'll warm it back up with my heat gun and keep on cutting it is glass so I'm being super careful not to flex it too much or cut too deep inside because once the glass gets pulled off there are fragile ribbon cables underneath namely the wireless charging and the cable that goes to the fingerprint scanner slash power button which is conveniently located in the center of the back panel instead of up right next to the camera lens these little golden circles next to the power button just rest up against the motherboard to do all the communicating from here we can see the inside of the exterior camera lens this is actually made from Gorilla Glass 4 which lowers is potential for being scratched or damaged compared to just regular glass so that's good our goal here though is to see the guts of the camera unit so let's go deeper inside the phone there are seven non-proprietary Phillips head screws on the top half of the phone Glad LG doesn't try to complicate things then there are three more screws that hold down the loudspeaker to the bottom of the phone near the charging port I'll lift off the wireless charging it's got those same golden contact as for the power transfer that we saw with the power button with a lot of restaurants and vehicles adding more wireless charging stations lately I'm glad that LG has included it in their design bones with useful features are the best kinds of phones I'll disconnect the battery and then reach down and pull up the loudspeaker this little guy has the same water-resistant screen that we saw with the recent iPhones and the water-resistant Samsung phone there are a few more ribbon cables keeping us from accessing that camera I'll just start on snapping those like little Legos the front-facing selfie cameras up there at the top and the regular camera wraps around through the backside of the motherboard then down here at the bottom we have the screen ribbon cable and the charging port ribbon the motherboard will come away from the phone body at this point if you remember to remove the SIM card tray I left mine in place as an example for what not to do of course now the SIM and expandable memory tray are out of the phone I can finally lift away the motherboard from the aluminum mid frame and look at all these golden contact pads this is a repair guys dream a totally modular phone less plugs and connections mean a more simple and modular design to work with I'm definitely a fan of that we have a headphone jack up in the top left corner that deserves a thumbs up all by itself then the circular vibration motors right below that with his golden contact pads and then we have the earpiece and one small microphone up here at the top one super cool thing about this phone is that the earpiece turns into a receiver or a microphone during loud events like at a concert I'll explain more about this after we find the third microphone in just a second and then here's the front-facing camera that's also at the top of the phone right below that we have the golden contact pads for the volume buttons also embedded in this solid slab of milled aluminum is the copper heat pipe we took a thermal imaging camera to the heat pipe inside the LG G 6 and it actually does a pretty good job of wicking away heat from the processor and finally we get our first look at the two rear cameras on the back of the phone the standard camera is 16 megapixels and the wide-angle camera is 13 megapixels both held in place by separate ribbon cables the wide-angle camera is pretty cool all by itself but the standard camera could very well have the best cell phone camera hardware on the market right now I'll show you why as we tear it down first of all it does have oh is that optical image stabilization that not every camera has it also has electronic image stabilization to keep photos and videos extra crisp there is no optical stabilization on the wide-angle camera lens but that's a different ballgame anyway popping off the metal how for the camera reveals my favorite part the ten bit image sensor this means that the LGV 30 can capture over 1 billion colors and the special cine video mode can output videos with up to two hundred and eleven percent more colors and you can with the average smartphone these colors help improve contrast and definition of the image I'm a camera guy I use my cell phone camera quite a bit so I'm pretty excited about this big step up in extra camera power most computer screens these days can even display 10 bits of color yet so this camera is really leading the futuristic curve but even if your computer monitor only displays eight bits of color all the different shading that 10 bits can pick up will still enhance the dynamic range on your 8-bit monitor so it's still a good thing either way in order to fully utilize this 10 bit sensor though we need light and the more light we have the better the sensor can capture an image to help facilitate the light entering onto this sensor there is an F 1.6 aperture camera lens inside this plastic housing also a world's first on a cell phone due to the shape of the lens there's more light hitting the sensor on the LG v 30 than any other cell phone on the market the hardware is pretty intriguing and judging by my initial helicopter ride the software looks like it's keeping up so far it was around this point that I realized I was not going to be able to put this back together in one piece since I am at LG though I hope they have a backup replacement around here somewhere now that I'm finally through the plastic look at all these different lenses inside the housing it's pretty incredible how much development goes into such a small component LG has used glass instead of plastic for the main lens inside this module using glass instead of plastic improves image clarity and starts bridging the gap between DSLR and smartphone cameras before coming out to New York to see this phone I chopped open a real canon DSLR camera lens so I can see if the lenses were even remotely similar when placed side-by-side and while the Canon lens is significantly larger both camera lenses have the same basic construction with all the different glass layers inside stacked on top of each other pretty impressive after looking around I did find a replacement camera lens that fits inside the LG v 30 hopefully nobody notices what I did to the first one down at the bottom of the phone we have pretty much the cutest little charging port that I've ever seen there are two screws holding down the USBC port which is also connected to the third microphone inside this phone what about that earpiece mic again real quick so let's say that you're one of those people at a concert with your phone up in the air instead of your tiny little microphones recording the loud audio the LGV 30 earpiece turns into a microphone with anything above 120 decibels like a rock concert which means you actually get decent audio recording because the diaphragm of the earpiece is so much larger than those tiny little microphone it's a pretty sweet little trick plus the integrated quad deck allows quality playback of the audio you just recorded that's pretty cool all by itself the charging port has a huge thick orange rubber ring around the tip to help keep liquid out the non-removable 3300 milliamp hour battery is next on my removal list there are no magic pull tabs below this battery but the adhesive is not destructive like we saw on the BlackBerry key one with a little bit of force the battery pops up and out on its own still no dogs allowed though you might have noticed the extremely small bezels on the six inch OLED screen of the LGV 30 this was mastered in part by having the display driver IC flip around under the display and wrap up inside the phone you can kind of see it from this angle here removing the display from the metal mid frame would destroy it and I can only assume that LG wants their phone back in one piece I only attempt screen replacements if the display is already totaled speaking of getting the phone back in one piece cross your fingers that it turns back on after I reassemble it the cute little charging port and bottom microphone go back into the frame making sure that the rubber ring is still surrounding the port to help keep the water out every bit of water resistance helps I'll make sure the screen ribbon is folded down and out of the way before dropping the battery back in place there's still plenty of sticky adhesive on the frame so I'm just gonna reuse it the motherboard gets tucked back into the phone making sure none of the ribbon cables are caught underneath it and after plugging in the screen ribbon and the charging port ribbon I can set the loudspeaker back on top of the motherboard and get those three Phillips head screws back in place and the last thing to plug in is the battery the wireless charging can go on top of the motherboard it has little black plastic clasps that fit into the metal frame and then of course the additional seven Phillips head screws to hold it all down tight and finally the aesthetically pleasing glass back panel gets reappeared over all the components I'll definitely be doing my durability test as soon as I get my hands on a retail version of this phone and it looks like a clear back panel is also a real possibility it'll be engineering my durability test if it's anything like the LG G 6 though it'll probably do just fine I'm pretty impressed with this phone if the software is the hardware this might be the first time LG gets me to switch over from Samsung thanks again LG for letting me review your phone from the inside the camera hardware is pretty impressive come hang out with me on Twitter and Instagram and I'll keep you updated when I get the retail version of the lg v34 my durability test thanks for watching and I'll see you around