LG G6

OUR VERDICT

The G6 is a great phone from LG, one that pushes the brand back to the forefront of the smartphone pile in terms of design and screen. However, lower-spec performance and not upgrading the camera in a meaningful way while still charging a huge premium make this a tough sell.

With the LG G6, the modular design of the LG G5 is gone in favor of a more traditional phone, one that takes multiple elements from the top handsets around, blended together to make a more prosaic (but still intriguing) handset.

The G6 is a much more conservative design than its predecessor, taking the form of a sealed unit that drops the removable battery, replacing it with a larger-capacity power pack and waterproof shell.

Surprisingly, this phone isn’t using the latest chipset from Qualcomm, so you won’t be getting the full grunt of the Snapdragon 835. However, LG maintains this was a decision to benefit the consumer – using a chip it had expertise with rather than an unknown entity it couldn’t test fully.

Instead, it’s going with a Snapdragon 821 option, which LG told us was a better option given it had more experience working with the chip and could thus extract more performance rather than using an untested engine.

The screen is, really, the only place where innovation is still present on the G6, with the longer 18:9 display giving more screen real estate to play with, and introducing some clever little changes to the user interface to exploit the extra pixels.

Beyond that, there’s not a lot that marks out the LG G6 from the rest of the competition – and that’s a pretty good thing.  

Having used the LG G6 for a couple of weeks, it’s easy to see that this is a ‘grown-up’ handset from the South Korean brand. It just feels nicer in the hand, more solid and refined, and we really haven’t missed anything from the LG G5 at all.

Early prices were as high as $650/£649/AU$1000, but they’re already starting to drop, and while it’s still an expensive handset LG seems to have baked all the components together well, so at least you’ll be getting a decent phone for the money.

It’s interesting that some reviews have called the LG G6 a ‘return to form’ – apart from perhaps the LG G2, the brand hasn’t had a stellar flagship device for years. Rather, it feels more like a ‘finally understanding what users actually want in a phone’.

Update: The G6 isn’t the only hot LG phone brought to market recently. Arguably, its biggest phone of 2017 was the LG V30, which sits rather high up on our list of best Android phones. Unfortunately for the G6, the V30 is so good that it has kicked it right off the list. But who knows? Maybe the LG G7 will end up taking the V30’s place.

Interestingly, some recent rumors surrounding the G7 claim that LG has rebooted its development several times in the search for the next big thing. One such rumor states that the next phone in the G series might not even be called the G7. With MWC 2018 coming up, we probably won’t have long to wait until we see what’s next.

We’ve added comparisons to the top phones the LG G6 is competing with, including the Samsung Galaxy S8, Sony Xperia XZ Premium and HTC U11, so you can get a clearer picture of how they differ and which is most worth your money.

Lastly, LG has brought more color options for the G6. You’ll now be able to pick up the phone in Moroccan blue, violet, and rose in addition to its launch colors of silver, black, white, gold and a different shade of blue.

Design 

• An understated and sophisticated metal and glass build
• Impressively small bezels
• Water and dust resistance

The LG G6 is covered in a mix of glass and metal, with two sheets of Gorilla Glass (although weirdly it’s Gorilla Glass 5 on the rear, but only the much older Gorilla Glass 3 on the front) framed with a rim of aluminum.

What’s most impressive is how little bezel there is on this phone – we’ve now seen the same kind of design from Samsung on the Galaxy S8, but the narrow bezels have been shrunken top and bottom to create an impressive effect when you turn the phone on.

Anyone aware of the LG G5’s design will be surprised by just how… normal this phone looks. Gone is the dull plastic back of the LG G3, the odd leather of the G4 or the come-apart design of last year’s phone – the LG G6 is smooth and classy all the way around.

That will disappoint those who like the way LG has taken things in a different direction in the past, but honestly, the G6 design is a smart move. It’s the most classically understated and sophisticated phone we’ve ever seen from LG, and it’s the perfect platform for letting the internals shine through.

And it’s got the features that matter, like IP68 certification for water and dust resistance – a common flagship feature that was missing from the LG G5.

The rear of the phone is smooth, with no protruding camera bump – we’ll get onto the snapper in a moment, but LG told us it chose slimmer sensors rather than more advanced camera tech to make the design of the phone sleeker.

Screen

• Super-wide 18:9 aspect ratio doesn’t add much
• High resolution and supports HDR content

The 18:9 screen, (which is branded ‘FullVision’) is created by LG’s own screen division, LG Display. It extends the QHD resolution of its predecessor, making it ever more widescreen to boost the pixel count to 2880 x 1440 and uses LCD technology rather than OLED.

The corners are even curved to keep the aesthetic of the handset, rather than the sharp design most phones pack. It’s an interesting move, but doesn’t really add much more than novelty.

Battery life

• 3,300mAh battery delivers average life
• Battery smarts keep it healthy for longer

The improvement of the battery from 2,800mAh to 3,300mAh should bring cheers from anyone who wants a phone with a long battery life – LG has historically been excellent at optimizing battery, so packing in more power is always going to be a welcome move.

This is where the inclusion of the Snapdragon 821 processor is going to have an effect too, according to LG, as its engineers have worked with the chipset for longer and have managed to extract more performance out of it, which leads to longer-lasting and less hot handsets.

In terms of day to day use, the LG G6 is just, well, fine when it comes to battery performance. It’s as good as most on the market, better than the iPhone 7 and about the equivalent of the Samsung Galaxy S8.

In our battery testing, we ran a 90 minute Full HD video with the brightness cranked up to the maximum, and the phone dropped 14% of its power in that time, which isn’t the best we’ve seen, but it’s better than average.

The iPhone 7 for comparison dropped 23% in this test, while the Lenovo P2 – which has a big 5,100mAh battery – dropped just 8%.

In real terms, that means you’ll get to the end of the day with a little sweat on sometimes, as the power bar can be a little lower than we’d like come 5PM.

The LG G6 rarely ran out of battery, and when it was ensconced in a pocket the power drain was relatively minimal, but overall when in use the drop in battery life for the day was a little more than we’d have liked.

The ways you’ll charge your new phone are varied, and a little hard to explain as there will be so many versions of the LG G6 throughout the world. In the US you’ll be able to charge this phone wirelessly, with both PMA and WPC standards supported.

Verdict

The LG G6 is a phone that takes things back to basics, and 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.  However, Samsung has now appeared with the Galaxy S8, and that’s a phone that cranks the ‘bezel-less’ phone wars up a notch.

The larger display has been well used for the native apps, and thankfully worries about black bars appearing around the apps are unfounded. You’ll need to work with them a little bit to make certain apps run in full-screen, but ultimately the experience is sound and isn’t ruined by the new ratio.

Want to sell phone for cash? Wondering where to sell your phone?