- Hey guys, this is Austin.
The new Galaxy S8 is promising
to shake up the smartphone game,
but LG might just have something to say about that.
Big shout out to LG for hooking us up
with the G6 a little bit early.
Now they are not sponsoring this video,
but I am curious to see how it stacks up.
Take a look inside the box and we have the G6.
Now while the Galaxy S8 is getting all the hype
for having essentially no bezel on a giant screen,
if you take a look at this, it's not actually that far off.
There's not a lot in the box,
we have the power adapter as well as as a USB-C cable.
Now this is in comparison to the Galaxy S8,
which comes with a really nice pair
of AKG headphones in the box.
When you look at the G6 next to
the Galaxy S8 Plus and the iPhone 7 Plus
you'll see that, well, this just sticks out.
The idea of having much thinner bezels
just gives you more screen in the same footprint.
While the G6 does have thin bezels,
it can't quite touch the S8.
This is a little bit more of a blocky phone,
so it's got a completely flat display compared to the S8
which has curved glass both front and back.
If you look closely, you'll see the G6
has a slightly more pronounced chin,
but generally speaking they do look fairly similar.
They both do have those slight curves
around the edges of the display,
and with so much screen with so little bezel
it does feel like a new generation of smartphone.
This isn't a perfect comparison.
The Galaxy S8 Plus is a little bit bigger than the G6,
but if you have a standard S8
it's going to be about the same size,
but what really separates both of these phones
from other devices is the aspect ratio.
So the G6 has a 2880 by 1440p IPS display.
Where the Galaxy S8, an S8 Plus bumps it up to 2960 by 1440.
What that means is that these are much taller screens
than what you're probably used to.
So if you open a normal app such as YouTube,
all this means is that you get a little bit
of extra vertical real estate,
but if you're watching something like video,
what that means is that you end up getting
black bars on either side of the video.
Now this is not exactly a huge deal,
I think that the extra screen real estate
in 95% of your apps is worth the trade off,
but it does mean that video's not
going to fully eat up the screen.
It should be no surprise that these are
two of the best smartphone displays out right now.
So the LG G6 has a couple cool features,
like it supports HDR10 as well as Dolby Vision,
so as HDR video becomes more and more popular,
the G6 is ready to handle it.
The S8 might not be a huge upgrade over the last generation,
but it is still a terrific looking AMOLED display.
So the contrast is absolutely on point,
it's nicely saturated and it gets really bright.
So out of the box, it actually runs
at a slightly lower 2220 by 1080 resolution.
Now there's nothing necessarily wrong with that,
it's still reasonably sharp and they're doing it,
I presume to save battery,
but when you buy a super high resolution
great looking display on a smartphone,
you kind of wanna, you know, run it at full resolution.
As flagships in 2017, build quality
isn't an issue with either phone,
but I do prefer the design of the Galaxy S8.
What's cool here is that because it has glass
on front and back and they both have the same taper,
it's a very seamless sort of design,
especially with the very thin frame that goes
around the edges, it really does feel great in the hand.
Now, it's not perfect, it would be nice
if this had better speakers instead
of one small one on the bottom,
and the fingerprint sensor on back is not quite ideal,
but taken as a whole this is an absolutely killer design.
I love it.
In comparison, the G6 just feels
a little bit more old school,
so with the flat sort of edges around the side,
it just doesn't feel as thin in the hand
and it's not exactly a bad phone, don't get me wrong,
it does have nice glass on front and back,
and if I had not touched the S8, this would be great,
but in comparison it just doesn't quite hold up.
But there are some things I do prefer on the G6
and probably the biggest one is the power button.
Not only does it double as the fingerprint sensor
which puts it in a much better location
than on the Galaxy S8, but it just feels like a clever
use of space sort of combining your fingerprint sensor
which already has to be there anyway
with a physical button to turn on and off the phone.
One area where they are the same
is with the IP68 water resistance.
So no, you shouldn't go swimming with either of these phones
but I feel like for a flagship in 2017
there is no reason not to have
at least some sort of water resistance.
It's just nice to know that when you spend this much money
on a phone the little bit of splash is not going to kill it.
Both phones are also running Android 7.0
Nougat with their own skins.
Now I prefer what Samsung has done
a little bit more this time around,
it's a little bit of a cleaner interface
and while they have included things like Bixby,
which I'm just not going to use
because Google Assistant exists,
but for the most part, both phones are completely fine,
you can live with either skin
and of course, you know, launches are a thing.
One of the biggest differences
between the two phones are specs.
So while the LG G6 has the older Snapdragon 821,
the Galaxy S8 has the brand new Snapdragon 835.
So I'm curious to see how they perform.
(groovy music)
That's actually pretty close.
So one of the big advantages of the S8 is that it's an
octa-core processor instead of quad-core on the G6,
which means that it definitely
does win on the multithread side
and on the single thread side,
it's actually not a huge difference.
However, because it's the 835 and
it's based on a newer process,
in theory that should help battery life.
Cameras might actually be the biggest
difference between these two phones.
So while the Galaxy S8 has the same 12 megapixel camera
from the S7 with just a few software tweaks.
The LG G6 has dual 13 megapixel cameras.
So what's cool about this dual camera on the G6
is that while it was available on the G5,
there was a huge difference in quality
between the two cameras.
Whereas on the G6, yes the standard camera
is a little bit higher quality, it looks a little bit nicer,
but it's not a huge difference.
And a big part of that is that both cameras
have the same 13 megapixel sensor behind them.
Now when we jump over to the Galaxy S8
it is not a bad camera by any means.
You can get some really killer shots.
The big downside though, is that it just
isn't a huge upgrade over the S7.
So Samsung is doing some additional image processing,
so essentially, just like the Pixel,
they're constantly taking stills and using the best bits
of each one to combine into a final image
and it does look really nice.
I do think the S8's a little bit more of a natural image,
it's not quite so sharp and that bigger sensor
actually does give you just a little bit of depth of field.
One of the big advantages of the Galaxy S8, though
is that new 8 megapixel front-facing camera.
Not only is this fairly wide,
but it also looks really nice, especially in video.
And this is what the G6 front-facing camera looks like.
It's not bad, but it does not even come close to the S8.
Even for stills, the G6, it's fine,
but I think the S8 does win out.
So this is what video looks like on the LG G6.
So it looks a little bit oversharp to my eye,
but it is still shooting in 4k.
However, one of the cool things is
you can seamlessly switch between the two cameras.
So this is what the wide angle looks like,
and then we can jump right back into the standard.
On the other hand, the Galaxy S8
video looks pretty impressive.
So not only is saturation nice,
but because it does have the bigger sensor
we do get some depth of field here.
Also the stabilization seems to be reasonable,
you can see it maybe trips up
just a little bit when you make a big move,
but it is hard to argue with this camera.
I mean sure, it's not a huge upgrade over the S7
and the G6 camera, especially having the wide angle,
both cameras look great, especially for stills.
When you look at the whole package,
I think it's gonna be really tough to beat this S8.
And that kind of tells the story, I'm afraid.
The G6 is a good phone and if the S8 didn't exist,
it would be a great phone.
But the problem is, this just does so many things
so well that it's going to be hard to argue with.
So what do you guys think about the G6 and the Galaxy S8?
Let me know in the comments below
and I will catch you in the next one.