Gadgetory

hey what's up guys mkbhd here so in contrast to my last video which was maybe the most anticipated phone of the year so far this one's more on the other end of that spectrum you might not have even known LG who is coming out with a new phone this early in the year but they are this is the LG G 8 Finn Q and again LG for your own sake I'm just gonna call it the LG G 8 so this is your first look at LG's high-end flagship phone for 2019 and right off the bat design wise it's looking pretty familiar now as far as product design language goes I hate when there's change just for the sake of change like sometimes you find a good groove you want to keep that going and build on something like that if it ain't broke don't fix it but this to me feels like a design that probably could have been updated a bit but LG is sticking to their guns here so they're keeping the fingerprint reader on the back instead of putting it underneath the glass they're keeping the notch and the full array of front-facing sensors at the top and a slightly thicker than average bezel all the way around I mean it's not bad but when you compare it to some of the stuff that's coming out now you see where I'm coming from then they're keeping the headphone jack which people will love and it's backed by that high quality DAC they're keeping the boombox speakers that kind of vibrate the phone at high volumes but that get really loud it's still IP 68 certified it still has the Google assistant button on the left hand side and it still has dual cameras they did shrink the camera bump to zero though so credit to them for achieving the rare perfectly flat back that is nice and the phone itself isn't actually that thick either so it's nice to get this balanced feel in the hand and the specs are updated for 2019 as you'd expect so snapdragon 855 and then every spec will be six gigs of RAM and 128 gigs of storage and there's a thirty-five hundred million power battery which should be good enough for this 6.1 inch OLED display but of course really using the phone will reveal whether that's true or not but yeah as far as drastic and noticeable design changes that's not really what's going on with the LG G 8 I mean I guess I understand the fingerprint reader on the back keeping it you know you might not want to go ultrasonic under the glass with this first-generation maybe you wait it out a little bit put it in the V Series phone later this year I get that but the notch and the bezel are actually starting to look kind of dated which I mean again if you're coming from an older phone you might not mind that as much but it got a look at what you're up against so what LG is really banking on is their two main new features that will hopefully sell you on an upgrade so you may notice there's no holes or cutout at the top of this phone where that your piece or speaker usually is that's because LG's brought some of that fancy vibrating OLED tech down from their TVs into the phone so it's called crystal sound OLED and so essentially the top half of the OLED display is the front-facing earpiece now so you get to put your ear up to it and use it just like any normal phone call but the advantage is now it's holus so it's better for water-resistance the sweet spot is bigger to hear your phone calls clearly and because it vibrates if you're in a loud environment where you can't really hear it as well you can literally put it up against your cheek bone and it will work like bone conduction this is a Samsung phone so it's not this one but it'll work like a bone conduction speaker if you put it up against your face and a lot of environment so you can hear it better that's pretty cool now it's not loud enough to be the second half of a front-facing stereo speaker pair it's more just for phone calls but how sick would it be if the tech got good enough to actually make that happen for it to be a really full speaker how dope would a totally bezel ists full screen phone be that still has stereo front-facing speakers because the screen vibrates think about it anyway the second new feature is all up in these front-facing sensors in the knotch and it uses the IR blaster and the receiver and a new time-of-flight z-axis camera to do some interesting stuff that they're calling vain ID and air motion so vein ID is a biometric unlock that extracts an image via absorption characteristics of the hemoglobin in the blood in your hand so basically you're unlocking in phone by waving your hand over it and the sensors are reading the vein pattern and the blood in your hand to make a unique pattern to unlock you that's pretty silly but that's dope so hey I tried it out I registered my palm by floating my hand over the phone for a couple of seconds and then try the unlock and sure enough it worked I'd like to try this against some other people's hands and really see like how secure this is it might not even be as secure as the 3d facial recognition that also has but it's pretty cool nevertheless to just wave over your phone and it unlocks for you you get to avoid that awkward like leaning in over your phone to unlock it like you have to do sometimes with face ID and then the other new feature is air motion which is improved with the IR blaster and all the same camera stuff to do more things by waving over your hand there's more shortcuts and more things you can do without touching it so to activate it you have to hold your palm over the phone at just the right angle and you'll see this little bar up here and once you get it just right then you back your hand up a couple inches and when you do you'll see an image of your now motion tracked hand appear on the screen and you can do actions from there so from there you can do customizable apps shortcuts to open stuff you can dismiss or enable phone calls alarms change volume take screenshots etc and it's kind of cool when it works you can be watching a YouTube video for example and do the whole gesture thing to get it to play and if you get it just right you can adjust playback or even do the twisting motion to change the volume knob like you're you're just turning this imaginary volume knob over the phone it's neat but the key with that though is it's when it does work perfectly and from the hour or so that I played around with the g8 it seemed very finicky like it was very difficult to get it to work just right every single time like I kind of felt like I was always searching for the sweet spot to get it to recognize my hand just right like sometimes I was too low sometimes too high sometimes you know too close to the phone or too far away and it would give any feedback on the screen to fix it but I guess the longer you use the phone the more you'll get used to it and conquer the learning curve and get it in the sweet spot every time but the fact that it was so finicky kind of gave it this gimmicky feel like I didn't really want to go through the learning curve to get it to work but endgame I guess in a perfect world if this works exactly the right way your your cooking or something and you get yeah stuff on your hands so you want to just wave over your phone and open up a clock and set a timer boom just does it just like that you don't ever have to touch your phone or get stuff on your hands on your phone but as of right now it's like you can open apps but then what like you still have to go on the app and do what you want so it kind of feels incomplete and it's not even LG's fault like they built the way to get into things but we have voice assistance now that I kind of do more already so just kind of feels a little tough so as a feature I think that falls in a gimmick bucket for now it definitely makes a really cool demo which is awesome but I think if you think really far out in a future it could be really cool if you believe that's where things are going so yeah that that's basically the LGG eight pricing forward is going to be similar to the g7 so in line with flagships somewhere in the neighborhood of $800 like last year I'll update the description when there's an official launch price so yeah my conclusion is this is a super minor update to this phone it's like a g7 S which is fine that doesn't mean it shouldn't exist that just means you know people who like the g7 will like this but it's not gonna win any people who weren't convinced by the g7 or the g6 it's very much in the family but let me know what you guys think in the comments below if this is your next either way thanks for watching Tasi guys the next one peace