The LG V60 and VELVET Review: A Classic & A Design Restart
by Andrei Frumusanu on July 15, 2020 9:00 AM ESTBattery Life - Outstanding
Battery life has been an aspect where LG has had tons of issue in past generation devices. The root cause here was the company’s usage of LG Display manufactured displays, which all shared the same common issue of having extraordinarily bad base power consumption. This had always handicapped phones from achieving better results, more accurately tracking the SoC’s efficiency and the battery capacity.
The V60’s downgrade from 1440p to 1080p screen might help in that regard, and the manufacturer also opted to include a large 5000mAh battery. The Velvet’s 4300mAh battery should also fare adequately – here’s more of a question on whether the Snapdragon 765 is as efficient as its bigger brother.
In our web-browsing test, we see the LG V60 do outstandingly good, coming in at 14.75H runtime. This vastly exceeds the results of any LG phone we’ve come to test in the past, and competes amongst the longest lasting devices in the market right now. LG still seems to have not quite as an efficient display panel as Samsung, as the S20 Ultra’s 1440p unit is only margins behind the V60, but the gap has considerably narrowed.
The LG Velvet surprised us with equally impressive results. At 12.73 hours runtime, it’s also a great result given the phone’s battery capacity, and nearly scales in line with the 700mAh difference to the V60. This bodes well for the Snapdragon 765 overall, although we’ve seen that the CPU cores themselves aren’t as efficient as on the Snapdragon 865.
In PCMark, the V60 even manages to get the top spot in our charts by a few minutes against the 6000mAh ROG Phone II, and the Velvet also fares extremely well against the competition.
Overall, battery life of both the V60 and Velvet is outstandingly good. In a year where most other competitors have opted for higher refresh-rate displays, LG’s decision to keep things simple is rewarded by being able to take advantage of the new silicon’s power efficiency in order to notably increase battery life.
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philehidiot - Wednesday, July 15, 2020 - link
Myself, it's a matter of price. For £400 more than my current SIM only package (over 24 months) I can get an S10. That's a VERY hard deal to beat. I'm currently paying £2.50 a month more than if I got on a decent 24 month contract as I've been awaiting the 5G rollout to upgrade, so I'm on a monthly contract with unlimited data. So any phone has to be available at £400 or less before even consideration as the S10 is the benchmark.flyingpants265 - Sunday, July 19, 2020 - link
Not a fan of S10's curved screen edges. Still annoying.What I needed was OP7, Samsung, or LG G4/G8, or Realme X.. with blackshark style front speakers, and no other missing features.
flyingpants265 - Monday, July 20, 2020 - link
Well... True, honestly.I'm no fan of LG, their phones are defective. And I want a phone with front speakers.
But this looks like a OP8 with headphone jack. Or S10 with no stupid curved screen.
The second Samsung, LG or OnePlus make a flagship phone with front stereo speakers, I'll be all over it.
peevee - Friday, July 24, 2020 - link
Agree on the useless pixels. Either the people are near-sighted and don't use glasses when looking at the screens, or just go by "bigger is better" attitude of self-delusion (claiming the see the difference without a double blind test).PeachNCream - Wednesday, July 15, 2020 - link
That's a lot of money to pay for a phone with a battery that isn't easily replaced. Kind of a pity since it doesn't really help make phones better in some meaningful way by stopping the user from yanking out and installing a fresh battery after it starts to get tired less than a year later.TheinsanegamerN - Wednesday, July 15, 2020 - link
Agreed, although with a capacity and runtime like that "tired in less then a year" doesnt apply. It isnt 2005 anymore.after 4 years my moto z play still has great battery life and is only just now starting to falter. Even so I agree on the price, no way I'd pay $900 for a phone.
PeachNCream - Wednesday, July 15, 2020 - link
It's probably more of a symptom of the phones that I end up using, but I do find myself on an annual-ish replacement cycle for batteries regardless of the design and that means keeping a small set of specialized tools plus rolling the dice with replacement batteries. That is present day experience though rather than one from fifteen years ago when, in fact, my cell phone battery retained its endurance for quite a bit longer due mainly to the fact that it was necessary to charge the battery once a week or so rather than daily.TheinsanegamerN - Wednesday, July 15, 2020 - link
My work gives us iPhones. While 3-4 hours runtime is the norm for them, I never had one lose appreciable battery life after less then 3 years outside of the 6s’ faulty one.My personal phones have been a moto z play and before that a note 4 with a 10,000 mah zero lemon battery. The moto is showing signs of wear after nearly 4 years, the note never showed signs of wear. Before that was a dumb phone that went many years on the original battery.
TheinsanegamerN - Wednesday, July 15, 2020 - link
I should note all my personal phones went at least 3 days on a charge when new, with the dumb phone pasting 2 weeks and the note lasting 7-8 days. The moto z play goes 3-4, but I was forced to upgrade, Id’ve stuck with the note 4 if I could.PeachNCream - Friday, July 17, 2020 - link
If I leave my phone alone, it will generally sit idle for close to four days without requiring a recharge. That is a rare thing though since I tend to put my phone to use doing just about everything I used to do on my computer. Mine tends to be busy most of the day with web activity, e-mail, lengthy writing (always working on the next novel), watching videos, streaming radio or running local music, playing a few games - mainly emulators of 8- and 16-bit consoles but sometimes a few native Android games as well so I rarely end the day without charging. Since lockdown and staying at home became a thing, I've just let my phone connected to a charger almost constantly and that's been nice.Brings me back to the point though. I usually see well over a 30% drop in battery life over the course of a year and that's annoying enough to warrant an annual replacement which is never fun thanks to spudgers, tiny hex screws and so on. It isn't the most tedious thing I get to do, but it would be a LOT better to simply make the battery removable.