Where do we go from here? It’s a question facing the makers of top-end phones.
Samsung says, “What do you mean? We’re already here”, having made the Galaxy S9 so similar to the Galaxy S8. Huawei made bold camera changes in the P20 Pro. And Apple’s iPhone X gave us the notch.
What about LG? The LG G7 ThinQ is a vehicle for Google Assistant and, more appealing, a greatest hits compilation of LG's recent top phones. Those looking for innovation will find a selection of sanded-down and refinished mostly familiar bits. But there are at least a lot of them.
The LG G7 ThinQ’s name alone suggests LG thinks a phone alone isn’t enough to pull us in anymore. But what on earth is “ThinQ”?
LG says this is a new family that will reach across all sorts of products. TVs, audio tech, even washing machines, will become “ThinQ”. It doesn’t have anything to do with thickness, but intelligence. This makes its official pronunciation of “thin-Q”, rather than “think” all the more baffling.
LG hasn’t tried to make a phone that writes your messages before you pull up the virtual keyboard, or pre-preemptively order mother’s day gifts behind your back, though. Like many uses of “artificial intelligence” in phones, its influence in the LG G7 ThinQ is fairly mundane.
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When you take photos with its rear cameras, it’ll identify 19 types of scene elements. Like babies, people or food: all the good stuff that litters social networks like rubbish left on a beach. It will then pre-emptively apply image settings and suggest filters to make your eight-month-old look extra like-worthy as it silently fills its nappy out of shot.
Huawei uses the same “AI” in its latest phones, using roughly the same techniques. If people like it, that’s great. However, tricks like this are at risk of becoming the equivalent of one of those 90-percent syrup coffee confections. Doubling green colour saturation just because the LG G7 ThinQ spots an apple in the scene isn’t actually a good idea.
We’ll have to see how LG’s camera AI plays out in a later test.
A dedicated Google Assistant button is the other nod to artificial intelligence in the LG G7 ThinQ. It sits on the left side of the phone, and LG worked with Google to implement it.
One quick press brings up the Assistant. A long press puts Assistant into walkie-talkie mode, making it listen in without using the “OK Google" prompt. And, yes, if you don’t put security measures in place and accidentally fire this up in your pocket, it will record your conversation and store it on Google’s servers.
This is Google’s answer to the question: where do we go from here?
Google wants us to use Assistant, ideally to the point where we forget how to do virtually everything without it. It’ll become a live-in virtual carer when buying toilet roll from the local supermarket finally seems an impossibly burdensome task.
LG told us the G7 ThinQ’s assistant button will not be re-mappable at launch. We quietly believe LG would like it to be. And we know most buyers would. But LG clearly wouldn’t want to torpedo a feature Google likely considers this phone’s key strategic asset.
Pushing the Assistant this aggressively may seem contrary to what most of us want. But, then, the idea of a smartphone seemed slightly ridiculous to most of us. Until it wasn’t.
LG has also tried to give the G7 ThinQ Amazon Echo-like listening powers, with “Super Far Field voice recognition”. This doesn’t use a giant array of far-field microphones like one of the digital assistant speakers. The phone has two mics, and machine learning techniques LG says it developed with Qualcomm to help the phone pick up your voice from across the room.
Not all of the LG G7 ThinQ’s stand-out features are to do with smart home-related tech. There’s plenty of the usual Top Trumps one-upmanship, too.
LG says the phone’s 6.1-inch 3120 x 1440 screen can reach 1,000 nits brightness, and not just when displaying a small patch of white either. This is part of a “boost” display mode that can be switched on manually, or will do so automatically in very bright conditions. The display will look clearer than most on very bright days. Nothing wrong with that. The display uses extra white sub-pixels to reach this level of brightness.
LG also offers several ways to cover the bald spots left by the G7 ThinQ’s display notch using the Second Screen feature. Like the P20 Pro, it can be blacked out. However, those after a comb-over more elaborate than Donald Trump’s can also use gradients and other textured patterns. Less than a year into the life of the notch, a way to hide it is fast becoming a must-have for any notched phone.
Sound quality is one of the more compelling reasons to buy an LG G7 ThinQ rather than another top-end phone. It has the Quad-DAC chipset used in the LG V30, a headphone jack and a rather unusual speaker.
What’s a Quad-DAC? This is simply a fancier version of the hardware that converts digital audio into the analogue signal that reaches our headphones or speakers. It has an important part to play in portable sound quality. This and the headphone jack make the G7 an obvious choice for audiophiles.
The speaker is one of the LG G7 ThinQ’s silliest, but most fun, features. LG calls it "Boombox". The speaker driver deliberately vibrates the back of the phone’s casing to pass vibration onto the object on which it rests. This strategy does actually work, and even without it the LG G7 is loud. However, the unfortunate side-effect is the phone seems to buzz in your hand as it plays music. Do you really want that?
Other parts of the LG G7 ThinQ are familiar. Like the LG G6, it has a dual camera array. One has a normal lens, the other a 107-degree wide-angle one.
This time both have 16-megapixel sensors, up from 13 megapixels last year. Both are 1/3.09-inch sensors with very small 1-micron sensor pixels. That’s normally bad news for low-light image quality.
However, LG claims to have far better low-light performance than the iPhone X or Samsung Galaxy S9, using a pixel-binning “Super Bright Camera” mode. This merges the output of multiple sensor pixels, sacrificing potential detail for sensitivity.
The demos LG showed off seemed impressive. But it also seems unlikely it will be able to compete with the low-light mode of the Huawei P20 Pro, which is truly dynamic.
Now that glass and metal have reached the designs of some of the cheapest phones, there’s nothing too exciting to say about the LG G7 ThinQ’s build. You get Gorilla Glass 5 on the front and back. It looks nice. There’s series-7000 aluminium on the sides. It feels nice.
There are four colours finishes. They all look, yes, nice. But glass and metal are no longer enough of a draw on their own to open purses. With a rather ordinary 3,000mAh battery size, audio and potentially pricing may be the key appeals of the LG G7 ThinQ for the average buyer.
LG had no price details or release dates to announce at launch, but phone networks are expected to reveal their own prices imminently.
Display: 6.1-inch QHD+ (3120 x 1440 / 564ppi)
Rear-facing camera: Dual 16 megapixel super wide angle (f1.9/107°) and 16 megapixel standard angle (f1.6/71°)
Front-facing camera: 8 megapixel wide angle (f1.9/80°)
Memory: 4GB DDR4
Storage: 64GB (microSD up to 2TB)
Dimensions: 153.2 x 71.9 x 7.9mm, 162 grams
Battery: 3,000mAh
Operating system: Android 8.0 (Oreo)
UK release date: Later this year
Price: £TBA
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
