The LG G7 Review: A Rushed Attempt?
by Andrei Frumusanu on August 9, 2018 11:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- LG
- Mobile
- LG G7 ThinQ
- LG G7
Battery Life
Performing the battery life tests on the G7 was a daunting task as the display makes it extremely difficult to maintain a set brightness. While in daily usage this is not an issue, it has extremely aggressive APL brightness scaling / CAB (Content adaptive brightness) with swings of up to 100nits on the backlight intensity.
For the browsing test, I actually had to set the display brightness to a level that took into account the average APL over the duration of the whole web test cycle as to maintain an overall average 200 nits brightness on the backlight. Least to say, battery testing on the G7 is extremely challenging due to this.
The resulting battery life run for the web-browsing test was quite good as the G7 ended up with a runtime just shy of 10 hours. Considering the phone’s 3000mAh battery, this is an overall good result and well in the range of other Snapdragon 845 devices. As expected, the smaller battery didn't handicap the phone in comparison to the G6, as the SoC efficiency gains compensate for the 10% smaller battery and actually goes beyond that, outlasting the G6 by an hour and a half.
PCMark’s battery run ended up with only 7 hours, although because of the aforementioned display brightness variations I’m not all that confident in this result as I adjusted the screen to the best of my abilities.
Overall the G7 perfromed quite well in the battery tests. Again it’s to be noted that subjective battery life of the phone will very much depend on your screen brightness usage patterns, and the lower brightness you will use, the worse will the G7 fare against other devices. The brighter you drive the phone, the better it will fare against other competitors.
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melgross - Friday, August 10, 2018 - link
Interestingbthatvwhile they include theciphones in a few benchmarks, they aren’t mentioned in the article even once.lucam - Thursday, August 9, 2018 - link
iPad Pro review anytime soon? Or You guys have given up on testing tablets?collegsd - Friday, July 5, 2019 - link
https://bit.ly/2Xt0XYc
https://bit.ly/32jw9bk
ados_cz - Friday, August 10, 2018 - link
I got new G6 week ago and was really disappointed with the jpeg processing and softness of the ultrawide angle module. Then someone noted that Google Pixel camera app was ported to other snapdragon devices and gets much better results. You can still see that it is not perfect if you pixel-peep, but I am in peace with it now when using the ported app.https://photos.app.goo.gl/d4K6LH4oazGmboBK6
abufrejoval - Saturday, August 11, 2018 - link
Must be quite a sight, seeing you walk around Luxemburg taking pictures with dozens of phones...Andrei Frumusanu - Saturday, August 11, 2018 - link
It's more of an issue of having enough pockets...chadhumm - Saturday, August 11, 2018 - link
One comment. I loved LG's but I had to return the LGG7 the worst phone Ive ever had in regards to reception. Makes all the bells and whistles worthless. This in many areas city and rural. Traded for the S9 it is much better but not as good as the Motorola z force that I was replacing. Too bad because I had good luck with the g2 and g3nikon133 - Sunday, August 12, 2018 - link
I'm reasonably happy with G7. Got it for my work phone as it is much cheaper than S9+ here in NZ... $1000 vs $1500.Camera is my only real disappointment - yes it does watercolor greenery. That said, I am a bit of a camera freak, and there is no camera phone that really satisfies me - whenever I plan to shoot, I will have at least RX100 on me, if not dSLR. This makes me dislike G7 camera even more - but, at the same time, it makes me not care much as well, since I usually don't depend on phone cameras. Down-sampled to ~2MP (1080p full screen), photos are usable. This is really where my phone cameras' expectations end, regardless of model.
Oddly, screen color hasn't really impacted me, albeit I have moved to this phone from Nexus 5X and Lumia 950 XL... both should have decent screens, if memory serves. Might be because I use phone under different light and ever-changing conditions are preventing me from really having an issue with screen accuracy. Screen readability is quite good, even under sun, and resolution is a pleasure. I am wearing glasses for distance and they don't work well up close, so I usually look at the phone screen over the glasses, and, in result, bring phone very close to my face... where resolution shows more than from "normal" reading distance.
Battery holds well in my scenario. Even at the begging when phone use was higher than average - downloading and trying apps, setting accounts, running initial updates etc., I was not draining more than 60% between morning and evening. Everyday use it is 30 - 40%. Basically I can do full 2 days, and with wireless chargers at my office desk and bedside, absolutely no problems here... that said, I don't play games on phone.
Overall? Happy, so far. I'm aware of compromises, but price difference more than justifies them, imho. I am also not a big fan of Samsung's curved screen - it does nook nice but it also does expose screen more, judging from my colleagues' experiences with S7 Edge and S8.
jvl - Sunday, August 12, 2018 - link
But...does it Loop Good®?!? Or will we have to wait until we find out?Great_Scott - Thursday, August 16, 2018 - link
What this review did better than anything else was convince me to get a OnePlus6. It has the best camera at mid/high light levels and the (very well done) LCD screen of the G7 is inefficient at the lowest light levels (which is where I set my phone the vast majority of the time). The smaller-sized battery isn't great either.