LG G8X ThinQ Dual Screen Review & Unboxing By TechTablets

Welcome back to the last mobile phone review here for 2019, this is LG's g8x. Thank you. The dual screen addition here. So this one comes prepackaged with the secondary case screen that really increases your productivity, so handy for those that are often, for example, in WhatsApp at the same time you like to be on Instagram, we like to watch movies, then this is really a great phone fall day. You could say it's almost like a poor man's version of a foldable phone. Those can, of course, be really expensive.

When you take a look at the Samsung Galaxy fold now this phone I've been using for the last week, and it is a lone unit from LG Spain. So that's a small disclaimer there, but all the opinions expressed in this review, like all of my videos, are 100% my own. So if you don't carry the specs of the phone, you can find those now on the left of this screen here in the box. You'll find an 18 watt charger. So this is Qualcomm quick charge.3 will charge the phone in just over 1 hour and 20 minutes. The four thousand William hour battery, so if you buy the dual screen edition, of course it comes with that dual screen case more on that just after this, and we do get some 3.5 millimeter headphone jack Chub lee do sound all right for free we're, not free but included in the box one's case as well, which offers decent protection, and then we do have an instruction leaflet, some spare ear tips and the Pogo connector here. So that's a Pogo port to the N type C for the case.

So let's first take a look at the secondary screen here that I think most people going to be interested in this is a unique accessory that I want to see more manufacturers doing so. What we've got here is glass on the front. There is just a tiny little panel in here that can give us all that on-screen information and if you take a look at the inside and the hinge here very good, build quality. There is a cutout for the earpiece. This is the type C port down here it is plastic.

Now this weighs 139 grams. So it is adding quite a bit more bulk and weight to the phone. It makes a thickness, then 15 millimeters, so the g8x here just simply slots in clips into place, and we do have this gap on here. So we still are using the original power button right here and when you plug it in then you can then turn on that secondary screen and start to use it pretty much like just an individual sip phone right there. If that's what it's like, because you can run so many applications, you can see right there in their own screen, which really does a ? a multitasking.

Now on the back of it, there is this big cutout here. That is, of course, for the cameras and everything, and they, let us see the name of right there. Now this is plastic on the back here, the material will it survive drops. Well, probably the back will, but I do find that, of course, with the glass around here and the fact that it's quite close to the edge I believe it will be very easy to break with this. But the overall build quality is good.

Now, on the left hand, side, we do have our hardware buttons here, so these are not just buttons that are connecting unto the original buttons on the phone actually separate buttons. That are part of the case right here. You can see down the bottom, there's a cutout for 3.5 millimeter, headphone, adapter, poker, port connector for charging it and then for our loudspeaker. Now this just runs off a magnet of course of Poker ports. You simply hold it up, and it connects into place very easy to remove, and I do like it that they've given us this option here, which is something a bit different, and you don't, of course, risk damaging the case or the port or anything, and then the phone's design is made out of Gorilla Glass front and back, and it's not bad I like the fact that the cameras here, even though we've got just two of them- that's a 13 megapixel ultra-wide 12 megapixel main camera.

We do have optical image stabilization with it, but they are flush, as you can see, so, there's no Ridge, no ugly, looking camera bump the way that protrudes and I hope going into 2020. More manufacturers can do this. They can just have the cameras within the rear, glass and not protruding out, which tends to be a little ugly there. So on the bottom here we do have one of two loudspeakers there's our type C port mic. You can see an antenna line there and a 3.5 mm headphone jack that does have a quad deck to it, which I'll get onto later on in this review. So, on the right hand, side here, we've got the power button, and it's just another secondary mic there and then at the top there's our sentry.

So this will take two NATO, Sims or micro SD card and one NATO sim so great to see in a flagship just like Samsung micro SD card support, so the earpiece at the top, with our water drop teardrop notch there does house 32, megapixel camera that does pixel burn and takes images at 8, megapixels and right now you can see the Bissell's okay they're, not the slimmest that I have seen. I also wanted to demonstrate that the fingerprint reader then was not actually too bad. The speed of that see here. You can see those bezels that you, okay top and bottom they're, not the slimmest that I have seen now. This screen is an OLED panel here cos: P OLED is full HD plus and the maximum brightness it tops out to be a little disappointing, I feel for a flagship.

It's around 380 nets, but that's on the manual mode. If you set it to auto, then it will go up to 600 nets, which you can see perfectly fine in direct sunlight there. Now the images I'll just quickly show you a couple of displayed images here. This is with display tester that I like to use, and you'll, see that it's not a bad screen at all. The gamma will come out to be around about 2.0 here. So it's a little off 2.1, of course, is 2.2 would have been more ideal, just increase that brightness, so that banding you're, seeing at the moment, that's just something that happens with my Sony camera with these o lead or AMOLED screen. So real-world images or just show you a few of those right now.

You can see that those do come out good. That's a sharp display, a nice display, but is it as good as, for example, as the Samsung S 10 pluses display that I have none? Now, if you're, like me, you're, probably wondering what, if you done, we have a teardrop water drop style notch on the secondary display? If this here writing it does not house a camera. Now, I actually put that question to LG. This was an ether in Berlin when I was there in September, and they said it's purely for aesthetics. It's to keep it symmetrical, the look of it, and they found that when they just put this without it that it looked a little strange, and that is why it's there, so we're basically like the exact same display on the secondary display and it as a quality display.

It's a good. Furthermore, it's just like the main one. Now I wanted to just point out a few things here to that, unfortunately, if we just go into our system here, just to point out that it's on android 9, okay, it's not on Android 10, not yet. Hopefully there updates coming through now, I noticed here that you will sometimes see a little of stutter when using dual apps either side and, of course, that's understandable, as I pointed it out before now. For memory, this one has 6 gigabytes of RAM.

In fact, I think that's the only option, I, don't think, isn't 8-gigabyte option actually for this mobile here. You notice that the way it's laid out does look a little to me. A lot like one, you eye settings, so I, don't know who's copying, who it's similar to the Samsung and the icon set in UI is fine, but what I'm not particularly too fond of, is this right here. So when you first get it you're going to get a lot of these bloatware applications. Now they've got dual screen apps, which are in fact games from Game loft there's about four or five of them pre-installed and a lot of other things in there too, like booking comm and other bits and pieces.

So hopefully they can just lighten out this ROM a little. It does to me seem a little over bloated. Now you see a little of even animation study here coming through then with that in the gallery, and I'm, not to sure, if that's because I'm running the dual screen, whether that means that the CPU is being taxed, of course a little more. Probably that reason, camera API level, 3 support. So if you're not happy with the low-light photos, then you can look for a course at Google, camera, port and Netflix does work with Full HD, because we've got Wide vine level 1 support.

Now this is an HDR screen as well, which is great, and here is our and 2 2 s, courses, version 8 and that's pretty much on par with other, so them checking 855 s would have been nice if they put the 855 plus in there. That would mean, of course, about a 15% boost to our GPU performance. Now, here's our wireless, very good wireless, really, really fast, here, good range as well, and even the signal, strength and quality I've found with 4G. Also, very good I mean take a look at these 4G speeds. I managed to get right here, so we have 124 megabits per second download that I have not actually seen.

This is from my house, to which it only has very poor signal, so that's 4g + speeds, so that is great and no problems again with the coverage there. Our GPS works well, you're going to get an accuracy of 3%, which is pretty much the norm for flagships with the snapdragon 855 +, better life very important. So this is just using a single screen. The main screen, of course, just the phone by itself without the secondary screen, I managed to get 8 hours almost nine hours on screen time with my own test there, and that only involves seven minutes of voice calls. So most of the time this was about 60% on why us 40% on data.

It's just to give you an idea that it's pretty much similar to other symmetric and 8:55 phones with a four thousand William hour battery within it. Internal storage speeds very good that says you if his to speak, not three, which I feel they could have possibly gone for, considering the timing of this phone and that might have appealed to more people to go and when snapped during 8:50 lo+ with you of history storage, that would make it the latest and greatest at the time its release. That is so. There is an option here that we can use the secondary screen. As you can see now as a touchpad as a game controller, sorry, better touchpad game controls, so what it's doing is just really emulating our Hardware controller on games that support Hardware controllers.

This is a sh felt legends here by the way which it does support the controllers, and it's nice that LG have done this they've given us this option. But to me, of course it's not as good as the real thing, a proper Hardware controller. It would be nice to if they did give us some triggers on the top here, just tiny little buttons. Would it be nice on the case, but I guess that would have added to the cost of it or just perhaps they couldn't do that now. We do have different styles of controls.

You can see here, so you can choose one that looks almost a little like something say: a PlayStation 4 there or xbox360 style the option there for haptic feedback 2 or a more traditional looking, old-style retro game pad there as well as mentioned it's nice, that we have this option, but I don't really see a lot of people using this, and then we're demanding titles. Here, like Call of Duty, the frame rate is a steady, 60 frames per second most of the time for me here. So it's not the fastest Android GPU. Now, because we have the 855 Plus, which is an overclocked version of this, but still the 855. The first edition right here runs great, and it's only in synthetic benchmarks, where you will see an actual difference between the two, not in gaming like this now holding it in landscape I'm, not noticing any issues with the wireless I'm, not creating any lag and looking down the scope very, very smooth as expected.

So all of those demanding android games run great here on their g8x so onto the audio quality here, so they still have their quad deck here, which is great a high fire. Quad DAC option comes up, but when you plug in anything that's 3.5 millimeter say he wired audio. If you're a big fan still of wired audio like I am, then you get great output out of this and the maximum loudness I find to be lacking a little considering it does have that quad deck in here so hopefully, with software updates. Lg can boost that now, the loudspeakers we have one down here on the bottom that handles the meds and the lows, and the top earpiece secondary speaker seems to be more highs and mid, but I'll give you a sample of it now, just before I jump into our cameras, samples, let's take a look at the applications. You can see that opened up them with a little of an animation lag to it.

So we just have two choices: it's just the main camera or the ultra-wide now in daylight. Very, very good photos perfect focus. Front-Facing selfies. There, okay, perhaps not the best I, have seen, but overall I, like the cameras row, feel they are falling short. A little happens to be their night mode so and low like these, aren't the best there are other manufacturers other flagships.

That will do this better, but here are those camera samples, as well as some video samples too from the front and rear cameras. So the front-facing camera here is one of the few that does actually shoot in 4k, and we do have electronic image stabilization as you can see, and it does work out well now there is a bit of a crop to the image, but overall, at my arms' length here, I don't have to hold the phone stretch. It right out. So I think that this is pretty good quality, we're getting here from the front-facing camera for your vlogs and great to have this 4k option so when you're shooting you can swap over to the ultra-wide camera like so, and the electronic image stabilization here. This is 4k 30 frames per second is very good.

Now, I'll go back to that main camera because that one's the best quality ? for video that is and overall very pleased with this quality. The stabilization is perfect. So, overall, this is a really great phone, there's so much that he do like about it. We've got the quad DAC on there very, very good, wide audio output. From this good cameras, I mean the ultra-wide I think is very, very similar to the Samsung Galaxy S 10 that it does take a perfect snap out of all the Android phones, I've been reviewing, it happens to be one of the better ultra Lies main cameras.

Very good we've got that dual pixel face detection autofocus, so the focus does never fail. It's very, very good, not just relying on just phase detection, so we've also got then a bill that is ip67 water-resistant. We got wireless charging on their Qualcomm quick charge for support, although I feel the adapter should have been included in the Box, considering the price of this phone and that's where we come to one of the cons as well. So the price of it, especially here in Europe I, think, is overpriced. It should be more aggressively priced to be more competitive in the market here now.

Having the secondary dual screen is a great alternative, a great option to have for people that really are into their multitasking, so you can run. What's happened, one side Instagram on they are they all your social media or be surfing the web on one? You really there's so many things you can do with it and, yes, it will take away from the battery life a little in my calculations, it's to run about 20 to 30% that you will lose using the secondary screen, and it's not quite as bright as the main screen. Now the main screen brightness indoors right here right now, it depends on where you are on the auto setting will be at its brightest point, but in the manual setting I found it to be it's slightly. A little less than I would like. I would like it to be a little brighter indoors as well without having to use auto.

So that's just one area there now. The other thing is the fingerprint reader for me, as I pointed out, it's a little slow. It doesn't always work I've, never seen at the time it works for me about 70 to 80 percent of the time and I think the for the price of this phone that that's not perfect enough. Then the UI they use guys got a couple of things in there that I don't particularly agree with, for example, they need to really add proper full screen, jesters I know there is like a well almost like a full screen, while gesture mode they have for swiping on the bottom, the home button, but it needs to be like other manufacturers that you completely lose those on-screen buttons and just be all gestures and then okay, it's got android 9 should really be Android 10. They could have gone with a second camera on the back.

Sorry, a third one, it's with the ultra-wide and in main camera, maybe perhaps or two times or three times optical zoom would have been great to have that on there. So there's another thing too, with the UI, and that is there's no face. Unlocking I. Don't really understand that move, considering the fact that fingerprint unlocking for me is a little slow I would love to see, even though it's not that secure at least face unlocking. Why is it optioning not there and then bloatware? It comes with a lot of blows.

Apart from that, if you can get around those little cons there, this actually is a perfect phone. It's just you can see why some people tend to skip LG nowadays because of the pricing and just some of those things I pointed out, which is really disappointed to see because LG used to be at least in my eyes, very, very good one of the top manufacturers, and hopefully they can really turn things around push a little harder. Give us a lot more on 2020 with a new G, knowing which I hope to get my hands on and Mobile World Congress. If it will be shown there, it should be, and then, of course, we'll have a Snapdragon 805 the newer chip on there. So there we go.

That is the G 8x, the dual screen Edition here, so it's not going to be for everyone. It is still a good phone, but just be a bit aware of all those things I mentioned there. Thank you so much for watching the last mobile phone review of 2019, and I hope to see back in the channel with the next up-and-coming reviews. Bye for now.

Source : TechTablets