- [Michael] If there's one lesson that stuck with me
after a week in South Korea, it's that LG makes everything:
TVs, refrigerators, giant HVAC units, even elevators.
So I shouldn't have been surprised to see the company
announce record profits last week, except, well, I was,
because I cover mobile tech, and LG's smartphone division
has been pretty consistently losing money since 2015.
That's a problem the brand-new LG G7 looks to solve
with upgraded cameras, updated styling, and a boom box.
This is part one of the MrMobile review,
the first-impressions pass.
(funky electronic music)
The reason this is only half a review
is that I only spent three days with the LG G7
and its software was updated every night.
So I couldn't test things like battery life.
Also, LG said several times that the camera
was still being worked on, as well.
So, let's call this an initial review.
Stay tuned for the final verdict
coming in a later video after a longer soak.
LG phones have a habit of staying in my pocket
well after my reviews end, and there's one reason for that:
They're the only ones at the high end
that devote a lens to wide-angle shots.
That means if you're in a tight space,
like, say, a mud hut in the Jeju Folk Village,
you don't have to settle for a photo like this.
You just switch over to the wide-angle,
and you can squeeze in a lot more, without moving an inch.
Or, if you're on a boat on the Yellow Sea,
and ya can't get far enough from the rail
to frame a shot better than this,
the wide-angle's gotcha there, too.
See, for my money, this is LG's most compelling feature.
On the G7, for the first time,
the sensor behind the wide-angle lens
is the same as the sensor behind the main camera.
In previous models the wide-angle camera
has had to make do with an inferior sensor.
There are compromises, to be sure.
They're not the same aperture;
there's no optical stabilization on the wide camera;
and it's slightly less wide this year.
It's down to 107 degrees, from 125.
But I don't have to wait for final software
to say that it's still the best ultra-wide shooter
you'll get on a phone,
at least without slapping on a big third-party lens.
Now, rather than leaning in to that concrete differentiator,
this thing that no one else is doing, really,
LG is more enthused about buzzwords, specifically, AI.
It does the same thing as on
the updated V30 we saw in Barcelona.
It adjusts color and saturation
based on what it thinks you're pointing at.
And there's now also a portrait mode
to do that fake depth-of-field thing.
Back on the bright side.
One of the biggest failings of the last two LG phones
has been the mediocre selfie camera,
and that's been corrected with the G7.
The new eight-megapixel sensor is capable
of much crisper photos with a lot more texture, and it, too,
uses a wide-angle lens to fit more in the frame.
I'll share more camera samples,
stills, and video in part two.
For now, let's move on to audio.
The G7 still offers a headphone jack
and a high-quality DAC to back it up,
both rarities, these days.
For external audio, LG has a new feature,
aptly named Boombox Mode.
See, rather than go the typical route
of including dual speakers,
the G7 has a single bottom driver, but the internal casing
that ordinarily surrounds that speaker has been removed.
That lets the entire inner volume of the phone
serve as a resonance chamber, which makes it louder,
especially when you rest it on a hard surface.
These things here,
they are not accessories offered for sale;
they're just empty wooden boxes that LG used
to show how much louder the G7 can get than, say, the G6,
or the Galaxy S9, or the iPhone.
We even listened to the phone bumpin' tunes on a guitar.
Obviously, these are just demos.
Even if all you've got is a table,
the G7 will still fill a room better than any other phone,
with the possible exception of the Razr Phone.
A few more deets from my first few days.
LG went with an LCD panel on the G7.
Eh.
But it gave it a special brightness boost
that kicks it up to about 1,000 nits, on demand.
Yes, that's a notch you're seeing up top.
It's hardly the last one we'll see this year.
If it bugs you, you can flick a switch
in the software to hide it away.
The fingerprint sensor around back no longer doubles
as the power-standby button,
which has been moved to the side.
Flanking it on the opposite rail
is a dedicated Google-Assistant button.
No, you can't reprogram it.
The whole shebang is dust and water-resistant.
And, thanks to a Gorilla-Glass-5 backplate,
there's also wireless charging onboard.
That's a good thing, since the battery seems pretty puny,
at just 3,000 milliamp hours,
a 9% reduction compared to the G6.
We'll see how the endurance actually holds up in part two,
as well as how well the phone's video camera,
its new super-bright-mode camera, and software does,
and maybe by then we'll have some more details
on pricing and availability.
My early thought is that the G7 is the least
surprising phone to come out of LG in quite some time.
That's cool for somebody like me,
who's mainly in it for the wide-angle camera,
but for a company that hasn't exactly
been lighting the world on fire by sticking to the playbook,
at least in mobile, that doesn't fill me with hope.
Of course, I'll reserve my final judgment
for the full review.
Be sure to subscribe to the MrMobile on YouTube
so you don't miss it.
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Lemme know what questions you've got on the LG G7, folks.
Drop a comment below, and if I can, I'm happy to answer it.
Until next time, thanks for watching,
and stay mobile, my friends.
(light funky music)