The LG G8 Review: Solid, But Not Great
by Andrei Frumusanu on April 30, 2019 1:00 PM EST- Posted in
- Mobile
- LG
- Smartphones
- LG G8
- LG G8 ThinQ
Battery Life
The G7 didn’t have all too impressive battery life and the culprit here was the phone’s rather small 3000mAh battery as well as the very high base power consumption of the phone. The new G8 addresses the former issue with the inclusion of a new 3500mAh battery, however there’s still remaining concerns regarding the phone’s base power consumption.
The G8 seemingly continues to use LG’s own DDIC in the form of an SW43410, and this unit showcases the same issues as previous generation LG Display phones: The phone still idles at a black screen with a base power consumption of 580mW, which is extremely high and pretty atrocious.
Samsung with the new S10 generation seemingly moved on to a new process panel and DDIC generation as the phones base power consumption saw a significant reduction down to ~390mW. What this means for the G8 is although the battery is larger than the G7, we’re not really expecting the phone post very competitive battery results.
In the Web Browsing test, the G8 indeed slightly loses out to the G7 of last year. Even though the new phone has a bigger battery and more efficient SoC, it doesn’t help the phone as the new OLED panel is more power hungry than the G7’s LCD. For similar reasons and suffering from even high base power consumption, the LG V40 ended up with even more atrocious battery life results, among the worst of 2018’s devices.
In PCMark the G8 fares better than the G7 and V40, however in absolute terms still lags behind the newer competition from Huawei and Samsung.
Overall, it’s massively disappointing to see LG struggle yet again in terms of battery life. I think we can now safely blame this on LG’s display panels and DDIC choices which have not improved over the last few generations, and rather have seen degradations in terms of power.
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abufrejoval - Thursday, May 2, 2019 - link
That is a very nice looking Ford Granada GLX!I sure did not expect one of those still in the wild, especially since the spare parts deposit burned down in 1977.
Great review!
LG earns a lot of respect that they keep on sending units to AT.
klingon55 - Thursday, May 2, 2019 - link
The LG G6 had an OLED display. So this is not the first.Andrei Frumusanu - Friday, May 3, 2019 - link
The G6 was an LCD...808Hilo - Thursday, May 2, 2019 - link
Looks like a highly defective copy of my Essential ph-1. Which, after, 2 years, is still state of the art. I wonder why those large corps cannot make a single decent unflawed phone for a change.Wardrive86 - Saturday, May 4, 2019 - link
Looks like LG is using the same heat dissipation pipe on the G7 and G8. Average 18% more GPU peak performance, average 18% more GPU sustained performance in essentially the same body. Impressive IMOdr_pingu - Sunday, May 5, 2019 - link
Had a g4 with the classic bootloop. Company never admited the bad manufacturing (officially in Spain). OFC never buying nor recomending brands like that, they can crash asap imovortmax2 - Tuesday, May 7, 2019 - link
"Here the G8 is not only noticeable slower as the new Galaxy S10 in both SoC variants, but it’s also noticeably slower than many of last year’s Snapdragon 855 devices."Think you meant '845 devices'.
KristenBrown - Wednesday, May 8, 2019 - link
Awesome review!Mark Dirac - Monday, May 13, 2019 - link
Why on earth do LG not simply permit disabling of the camera's over sharpening? My LG G6's images were so dreadful that I didn't bother taking any photos with it for 6 months, until Open Camera introduced the capability to switch off the LG G6's sharpening and noise reduction (Camera2 API). At which point I found I had a pretty good camera.yindesu - Sunday, September 11, 2022 - link
> What is most shocking however is the fact that the G8 feels slower than the G7. In side-by-side comparisons between the two phones, the G8 is slower in opening a lot of applications or in-app views. This is extremely disappointing and clearly points out that LG has messed up somewhere in terms of the SoC’s BSP integration.Is it not explained by the G8 using eMMC storage when the G7 had UFS 2.1?