The LG G8 ThinQ is the newest arrival on the flagship block and it brings the full 2019 package: a Snapdragon 855 chip, a beautiful AMOLED screen and a bigger battery than the predecessor.

We have prepared a concise version with everything that you should know about LG's 2019 flagship.

These are our 8 key takeaways from our LG G8 ThinQ review.


There are three main things you should know about the design of the G8: it feels every bit as premium as other flagships with a very solid glass body and a metal frame, the signature red color is spot on and looks really good, and this is one of the most slippery phones out there! For those of you that will use it with a case, that's not much of a problem, but if you prefer to carry your phone around with no case, well... be careful where you place it. Our review unit has already slipped off a table a couple of times (thankfully, it survived and still has no cracks).

And yes, you do still have a headphone jack on board as well.


If you ask LG what is the coolest thing about the G8, the company will surely tell you about the new Air Motion gestures that allow you to control the phone with your palm from a distance, much like in the movie Minority Report, and it will tell you about the innovative vein recognition that reads the unique pattern of veins on your palm to unlock your phone. At least, those are the features that you see heavily advertized on LG's website and in promo materials.

But here is the thing: these features don't work great. Who in their right mind would have the patience to hover their hand on top of their phone to adjust volume when you can just press the volume up and down keys? Even if those gestures worked perfectly every time (they don't), it would still make more sense to use the buttons. Put simply, the features that LG advertizes are pure gimmicks.

So let's just ignore them and pretend they are not here, and judge the LG G8 for everything else great that's in it.


While most Android flagships these days seem to use a fingerprint scanner embedded in the screen, the LG G8 instead has 3D face recognition. And this might just be the most convenient secure unlock we have used on any 2019 Android flagship. First of all, this is true 3D face recognition, meaning that it is indeed secure and you cannot easily fool it with a photograph, and second of all, it's fast, it's accurate and it works in the dark. It's not quite perfect, but we find it works much better than most in-screen fingerprint scanners. Excellent job, LG!

You also have a traditional fingerprint scanner on the back, which works great too. It's fast and accurate, much more so than an in-screen fingerprint reader and you can also swipe down on the fingerprint scanner as a shortcut to quickly reveal your notifications which is very handy (you have to enable this in settings first).


One thing that surprised us negatively when using the LG G8 was the amount of lag and stutter in places where you would not expect it like in the home screen and the recent apps interface.

This definitely feels like a bug in the LG interface and something that we have seen on pre-production devices, but definitely not something that we can tolerate in a phone, let alone a flagship. The stutter is quite noticeable, but we do hope that the company will fix it with an update as this seems to be some kind of a bug and this is definitely not expected in a phone with the latest and most powerful Snapdragon chip around.