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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zeeBomb - Thursday, May 2, 2019 - link
How would I be out of my damn mind? The results are there, the display just isn't calibrated and isn't much of a step up from the G7. I suppose changing the display mode can remedy this, but of course for someone that isn't tech savvy, you would want the best out of your display, no?I guess what I meant to say its pitiful for not being accurate towards the color gamut. But dating back to my first G device, the G2, the IPS display was great.
Xex360 - Tuesday, April 30, 2019 - link
LG lost its imagination, we had very interesting phones from LG v10/20 G3/4/5/6, they had some problems but they had a "personality" and some good innovations, second screen, first with android 7.1, curved phone... Etc today they are just cheap ugly copies of Chinese phones, why copy the stupid useless notch while you had a more elegant and useful second screen?Lord of the Bored - Wednesday, May 1, 2019 - link
Their implementation of "second screen" basically means they invented the notch. That's reason enough to damn them, even if they did far it better than Apple and the current crop of imitations.cthunder67 - Wednesday, May 1, 2019 - link
So what has Samsung done to improve their design? It's the same curved display we have seen for the last few years.Wardrive86 - Tuesday, April 30, 2019 - link
Thanks for the review! Do you think the schedutil governor could be responsible for the performance in Work 2.0? (Assuming the G8 still uses schedutil)Arbie - Wednesday, May 1, 2019 - link
One good thing about the recent LG V-series phones fro the US is that they support all T-Mobile bands. AFAIK only the Samsung S8 & S9 models do the same.So - the text says this takes micro-SD, but it's not in the specs list under 'storage'.
Lord of the Bored - Wednesday, May 1, 2019 - link
"This is actually quite the competitive disadvantage for the G8, especially in the face of Samsung and Huawei’s newest triple-camera flagships."Why stop there? Compare everyone to Nokia's 5-camera spider-phone.
porcupineLTD - Wednesday, May 1, 2019 - link
To be fair the Nokia implementation of multiple cameras is just plain retarded.BedfordTim - Wednesday, May 1, 2019 - link
Nokia's implementation is designed to reduce the overall thickness which, while being pointless, it achieves. The trade off is that multiple small sensors don't collect any more light than one big one.I think where they have failed is in the software as camera to camera variations need to be overcome to properly combine the images and gain the benefit of the monochrome cameras.
Lord of the Bored - Wednesday, May 1, 2019 - link
Well, I think the multi-camera trend is silly in general. Nokia's is just the silliest.