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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hanselltc - Wednesday, May 1, 2019 - link
my question is, what the actual heck happened to the s10 with exynos in that second last picture on page 6?hanselltc - Wednesday, May 1, 2019 - link
Wait what? G8 has a night view mode now? was it not available or did u just didn't find it out lolhanselltc - Wednesday, May 1, 2019 - link
you just mentioned boombox and didn't test it or what?pjcamp - Wednesday, May 1, 2019 - link
If LG wants to differentiate itself, it can do two easy things: knock it off with the skins, and allow rooting. There aren't a whole lot of reasons to root anymore, but making Android Auto behave is one of them.PeachNCream - Thursday, May 2, 2019 - link
Dumping useless stock protrams that are out of date on day one and need an update anyway is another good reason to root. That Google search thing, Youtube, Chrome, two Photo viewers (Gallery and some Google Pictures thing), the books program, the doubled up music players, the movie software, all of that is useless crap that requires a lot of permissions. Nevermind the mandatory Facebook vendor value-add, like anyone older than 40 or younger than 20 even touches social media with a ten foot pole these days plus whatever other worthless stuff the phone company thinks I want. Rooting is nice to free up a chunk of memory so you can shuffle more useful apps into the system reserved area of NAND or roll old versions out and stuff current ones in so its a pity rooting is a rare thing. Though, I'd take a removable battery and an un-rootable phone 100% of the time over a sealed battery and rootability.Ratman6161 - Wednesday, May 1, 2019 - link
To me, this article points out something that I've always believed which is that benchmarks are useful but are nowhere near the whole story. So read them, but don't put an excessive amount of faith in them. They don't really tell you what the user experience is like.AdhesiveTeflon - Wednesday, May 1, 2019 - link
Great, are they going to have boot loop issues again where you get another refurb phone with the same boot loop issue?pcslide - Wednesday, May 1, 2019 - link
Can anyone tell me where were all those photos taken? I very much appreciate the scenery. Thx in advance.ukTechfiend - Thursday, May 2, 2019 - link
Fail to see how the G7 battery is such a disappointment to anybody, well over a days use possible, even two days is easy if you use it moderately. Also as far as colour saturation goes with the G8 screen, isn't this adjustable in the settings, like the G7? Full adjustment of saturation and colour tone is easily changed to your own preference.Andrei Frumusanu - Thursday, May 2, 2019 - link
It's not possible to get anywhere near better saturations with the manual controls.