The LG G8 Review: Solid, But Not Great

Conclusion & End Remarks

The G8 from the get-go wasn’t advertised to be a very exciting phone. LG’s devices in the past few years not only had trouble with differentiating themselves, but rather also had trouble with actually delivering on some of the basics of what makes a smartphone, such as display, cameras, and battery life. The G8 here didn’t need to be exciting or even innovative for that matter, LG just needed a phone that simply delivered on the basics.

In terms of the exciting stuff, LG’s main differentiating feature for the phone is the new ToF sensor and the corresponding gesture-based navigations and controls. While I didn’t cover these in detail for these review, the reason for that is simply that I found them to be overall gimmicky and generally useless in terms of experience. I can see some edge-cases where they would be useful, such as when cooking or other scenarios where you have dirty hands, but other than that it’s simply easier and faster to just use the buttons or touch the screen. Although LG’s features are gimmicky, at least they’re in my opinion at least the best attempt of making practical use of the new ToF sensor technology, so at least some credit is due in this regard.

But again, the G8 didn’t even need to differentiate itself with such features, it needed to deliver on the basics. So did LG manage this time around?

In terms of design, the G8 is an evolution of what we saw on the G7. The new phone maintains the same form-factor as its predecessor, while refining several aspects of the design. The new phone for one is a bit thicker and a little bit heavier, and the frame of the phone is thicker. For a phone of its size, the ergonomics still work out, albeit the design feels dated for 2019.

The screen of the G8 is inarguably the biggest change for the phone. The switch from LCD to an OLED panel definitely improves the contrast and viewing angles of the phone, however there are compromises compared to the G7, such as a reduction in screen brightness which is no longer class-leading.

The most disappointing aspect of the G8’s display is its calibration. In the past we’ve heard from LG that they deemed that punchy colours are preferred by users. It’s a fair enough reason, however with the introduction of a more accurate “Web” display mode we had hopes that LG would finally introduce an accurate profile. Unfortunately the new mode largely remains a mess. Colour saturation is all over the place, the mode doesn’t correctly adhere to the target gamut, and most annoyingly the gamma is just way off, resulting in darker colour tones. In the end the G8 ended up as one of the worst calibrated devices we’ve ever measured. If you value or are sensitive to colour accuracy, forget about the G8.

One aspect where the G7 and the V40 displays also largely lagged behind was the base power consumption. Unfortunately again, the G8 doesn’t improve in this regard as it showcases the same disappointing high power drain as on the G7. While the situation is not as bad as on the V40, the end result is that even though the phone has a bigger battery capacity and more efficient SoC, it doesn’t last as long as the G7 in our web browsing battery test. While in PCMark the G8 does manage to get back a more meaningful gain, it’s still overall a bit short of what we expected.

Performance was a big negative for the G8. Even though the Snapdragon 855 SoC should be able to perform excellently, the phone’s BSP and software isn’t as refined and tuned as what we find on the Galaxy S10. In fact, the G8 seemingly lacks some boosting mechanism that resulted in the phone actually feeling slower than the G7 in everyday scenarios such as switching apps or views within apps. This really shouldn’t be acceptable of a phone that prides itself in using the latest flagship SoC.

The cameras on the G8 are a major improvement for LG. Particularly the main camera sensor as well as processing holds up against the very best in the market, sometimes actually with the G8 leading. Particularly LG’s exposure, dynamic range and colour balance always seemed to be on point and the AI Cam in general should be the default capturing mode for most scenarios. LG still lags behind other vendors when it comes to details and it's still arguable if there's any benefits to some of the sharpening processing.

The wide angle module, while again an improvement over the G7 and the V40 (Thanks to better exposure algorithms), still very much suffers from massive lack of details and seemingly blurred processing. It’s a pity that LG didn’t manage to fix this issue, and now Huawei and Samsung have both surpassed LG on its own turf.

Today’s smartphone low-light photography capabilities can be divided into two groups: Huawei and Google, and everybody else. So even though the G8’s camera does well in low-light, it firmly belongs to the latter group and can’t really compete with the top of the line low-light capture ability.

Finally, an innovative feature of the G8 is the new under-screen speaker. I was actually surprised how well it works, and it’s definitely a big improvement over the G7’s mono speaker. But in the end, it’s still no match for a real and more powerful earpiece speaker.

In the end, did the G8 deliver on the basics? In some regards, yes, while in others the G8 is still very much a compromise of a phone. LG has improved a lot on the camera and speakers. On the display side of things, the G8 is an improvement on paper but in practice it fails short. Battery life has improved in some regards, but if you tend to use your phone a lot in higher brightness levels the G8 will seem like a downgrade.

I think the most important conclusion for the G8 is that it really isn’t able to convince me buying it over say a Galaxy S10. The latter has a better screen, better battery life, better cameras (You don’t need a Korean version to have triple-cameras), better speakers, better software, and better performance.

In the US, the G8’s official unlocked MSRP comes in at $849, which I find to be simply unjustifiable. Some carriers such as T-Mobile offer it a lower $619 price point which represents a lot more reasonable purchase. If you’re able to get the phone at the lower price point and willing to live with some of the aforementioned compromises, then the G8 should be a good phone for you – it’s just not a great phone.