The new standard
LG’S LATEST FLAGSHIP BRINGS THINGS BACK TO BASICS — WITH ONE OR TWO TWISTS.
WITH ITS NEW flagship, LG’s ditched the modular design of last-year’s G5 in favour of a more traditional approach — one that takes multiple elements from the today’s top handsets and blends them together to assemble a terrific all-rounder of a smartphone.
The G6 is much more conservative in design than its predecessor, taking the form of a sealed unit that drops the removable battery of the previous LG flagships, replacing it with a larger-capacity power pack and waterproof shell, which we think is a decent trade-off.
While it’s lacking somewhat in terms innovation, it makes up for this with its impressive 18:9 display. This, along with narrower bezels around the edges, gives the user more screen real estate to play with, and also introduces some clever little changes to the user interface to exploit the extra pixels, especially when it comes to its multitasking and photo-taking capabilities.
The bad news for LG is that Samsung’s also come to the same party: the Galaxy S8’s screen has a similar aspect ratio with even smaller bezels and curved glass edges, meaning that as impressive as the G6’s display is, it’s a far more conventional and ‘safe’ design by comparison.
The 5.7-inch display is also an IPS LCD unit, so it lacks the vibrancy of Samsung’s Super AMOLEDs, although the addition of Dolby Vision (a first for any handset) and HDR 10 support means that all manner of beautiful and natural-looking high dynamic-range content still looks terrific on this display — this is as good as LCD gets, at present.
The G6’s camera has also been upgraded in a fashion, although it remains very similar to what was offered in last year’s handset. The same normal and wide-angle camera lenses are back, but they’re now both 13MP as opposed to last year’s 8MP sensors. This year’s front-facing camera is 5MP and the lens has been tweaked to allow for wide-angle selfies and larger group pictures.
While the G6 has a bigger 3,300 mAh battery this time around, it only improves upon last year’s model by around half an hour in actual run time. Our tests revealed a battery life of around 6 hours and 22 minutes, which is well below average for a premium phone. This time, you can’t swap in a spare battery, either.
Still, the G6 fared slightly better in other performance benchmark tests, though it’s held back a bit by its older Snapdragon 821 processor. Its GeekBench 4 single and multi-core scores of 1,741/4,127 means that while it falls quite short of the powerhouse Samsung Galaxy S8 (2,009/6,552) and even last year’s S7 (1,840/5,441), it does compete with the likes of Google’s Pixel phone (1,537/4,190).
The LG G6 is a phone that takes things back to basics, and largely does so well. The sleek metal and glass fusion is attractive, and to anyone using the iPhone 7 Plus, the ratio of screen to body will be staggering. Though it lacks any real headline features that will lure people towards it on the shop shelves — Samsung’s stolen the thunder from that ‘unique’ 18:9 screen ratio by matching it on the S8 — LG has produced an admirable phone with little to dislike... and we can’t wait to see what it does with the G7.
THE LG G6 IS A PHONE THAT TAKES THINGS BACK TO BASICS, AND LARGELY DOES SO WELL. THE SLEEK METAL AND GLASS FUSION IS ATTRACTIVE, AND TO ANYONE USING THE iPHONE 7 PLUS, THE RATIO OF SCREEN TO BODY WILL BE STAGGERING.