LG G7 ThinQ hands-on: The loudest, brightest smartphone yet

As much as I liked LG’s V30 and G6 last year, numbers don’t lie: The company’s latest earnings show just how a tough the smartphone business is. So what kind of approach would LG take this time around? Play it safe or go bonkers? Well, in the end it was a bit of both. With the V30S ThinQ, LG started planting its seeds in the machine learning field, and gave us the first taste of its AI-assisted camera. But barring that, the V30S ThinQ was largely identical to its predecessor. It did give LG a couple more months to polish its latest flagship, the G7 ThinQ, which focuses on delivering the brightest display, the loudest sound and a more powerful AI Cam. Yes, there’s a notch, too.

Let’s get the main specs out of the way. As you’d expect from a flagship device these days, the G7 is powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 chipset — a forward-thinking move compared to how the G6 went with an older, slower processor than its rivals. Depending on your region, you may get both the base model with 4GB of RAM plus 64GB storage, and the G7+ ThinQ with 6GB RAM plus 128GB storage; both support microSD card expansion of up to 2TB.

There’s also a familiar-looking camera bump plus a fingerprint reader on the back, though the latter no longer serves as a power button — you’ll have to use the new dedicated button on the right. LG, which has avoided the usual power button placement until now, said this change came from users that said the two-in-one button was too sensitive. Besides, users can set up the new power button to quick launch the camera app with a double-tap, which I find far more convenient than turning on the screen for the shortcut icon.

Speaking of, there’s yet another new button positioned below the volume keys on the left: the Google Assistant Key. LG approached Google with this idea, and the result was a button that offers three input modes for Google Assistant: click once for the usual voice input; press and hold to talk to Google Assistant as if you’re using a walkie-talkie; and double click to toggle visual recognition.

And yes, all three input methods let you skip the “OK Google” command. I’m already starting to enjoy this more straightforward approach — it’s just less dorky. But should you wish to use that same old voice command to toggle Google Assistant, the G7’s dual-mic “Super Far Field Voice Recognition” can pick up one’s voice from up to five meters or about 16 feet away — even in noisy environments, supposedly, but I didn’t get the chance to try this myself.

Even though Samsung’s Bixby button might have been the inspiration for this addition (not that LG would admit), chances are you’d be more likely to use LG’s offering given how much more powerful Google Assistant is. Still, if you’re not a fan of this feature, while you can disable the button, you can’t remap it.

Despite the name, the G7 inherited many qualities of the V30 series in terms of look and feel, especially with the shiny finish, curvature, the shape of the camera bump and the screen’s rounded edges. If, like me, you’re already a fan of the V30, then you won’t be disappointed with the G7 when you get one in your hands.

While the G7 may not look as rugged as the G6, both devices — along with the V30 series, for that matter — have the same IP68 certification plus 810G military standard rating, so there’s apparently no sacrifice in durability for this prettier look. I got to see all four colors — “New Moroccan Blue,” “New Aurora Black,” “Raspberry Rose” and “New Platinum Gray” — and personally I’d go for either the blue or red.

I wouldn’t be surprised if the G7’s design was originally intended for the V40 or some sort of V30 variant, but there’s one key component that draws the line between the V series and the G series of late: the display.

LG decided to stick with a 6.1-inch QHD+ LCD instead of the OLED found on most flagship smartphones in 2018. But that’s not a bad thing: When placed side by side, the G7 made the G6’s LCD look, quite frankly, dull, and it was almost as vibrant as the OLED screens on the iPhone X and Galaxy S9. In technical terms, LG says this LCD panel covers 100-percent DCI-P3, or 135-percent sRGB, color gamut. What this all means is that it’s a huge leap forward from the G6’s screen tech, even if both are LCD.

But the real selling point of this “Super Bright Display” is its 1,000-nit brightness for outdoor use. There’s a “Boost” button next to the screen brightness slider in the notification drawer to toggle this maximum brightness setting, and this will maintain the 1,000-nit level for three minutes before it gradually dials back down. This is both for the sake of battery life as well as to avoid overheating. It also gives your eyes ample time to adjust to the sunlight. It certainly worked well during my time with it in direct sunlight: This phone was made for using outdoors.

As for power consumption, LG claims that, at 500 nits, the G7’s LCD actually uses 30-percent less power than most of the competition. It has nothing to do with a new backlight, but actually the RGBW pixel arrangement on the panel, with an extra white sub-pixel involved with all that extra brightness. It’s not the first company to experiment with sub-pixels this way: Sony once tried a similar display tech on the Xperia P back in 2012.

Alas, LG has used these power savings to justify shrinking the G7’s battery compared to its predecessors. In order to keep the 162-gram weight and 7.9mm thickness, there’s a 3,000mAh battery — both the V30 and the G6 had a 3,300mAh cell. Well, at least there’s still Quick Charge 3.0 as well as wireless charging. We will have to see how this smaller battery holds up in our upcoming review.

Now, don’t worry, I haven’t forgotten the notch. LG cheekily calls this the “New Second Screen,” because it wants to remind you that well before the notch trend, it already had a tiny secondary screen on the V10, V20 and Q8. LG may have ditched this feature eventually, but the notch display offers something similar once again; plus you can always hide the notch with a black bar or a gradient background.

Another highlight of the G7 is its “Boombox Speaker” feature, which claims to be ten times louder than the competition. While I didn’t have the right equipment to fact-check LG’s statement, the G7’s speaker was indeed very powerful. It easily blew other smartphones away, including the iPhone X, the Galaxy S9+ and some earlier LG devices that were also part of my demo. I can confidently say that the G7 is the loudest smartphone I have ever come across, and what was more surprising was that it was all coming out of a single driver — not two — within the device.

The trick? It’s all about expanding the speaker’s resonance space to help further amplify sound waves: Instead of using a conventional speaker module’s own tiny chamber, the acoustic engineers at LG realized that, given the phone’s internal waterproof sealing, they could simply expose the speaker driver to the entire space within. The result is eight cubic centimeters of resonance space inside the G7, which is about 17 times larger than the speaker modules found in LG’s recent smartphones. Better yet, the speaker unit is also 39 percent larger than before.

Thanks to the extra bass, the G7’s body can also act as a passive sound radiator and take advantage of any hard surface it comes into contact with — be it a guitar, a random wooden box or even just a desk. Obviously, the overall sound quality will vary depending on the surface, but in general I found these pairings to sound richer and more rounded than listening to the G7 by itself. I ended up having fun placing the G7 on random surfaces to see what the combination sounded like. The guitar was my favorite.

Of course, the effect isn’t comparable to real Hi-Fi speakers, and I would actually recommend against blasting out music at full volume when you’re holding the G7 in your hand. There was some distortion as I pushed the speaker to its limit at that point, but I was fine with it after dialing it down by one or two clicks. Placing the phone on a desk, on the other hand, made the louder playback more tolerable thanks to the additional bass response — a 15 to 20 dB improvement in performance, by LG’s measurements.

The 3.5mm headphone jack is here to stay at the bottom, and this is still powered by a Hi-Fi quad DAC to satisfy audiophiles. The G7 also happens to be the first smartphone to support DTS:X, which delivers virtual 3D surround sound at up to 7.1 through any pair of headphones.

Last but not least, the cameras. On the front, LG finally upgraded the selfie camera from 5 megapixels to 8 megapixels (f/1.9, 80 degrees), and in my quick side-by-side comparisons, the improvement was certainly noticeable. The colors were accurate, and my hair, eyebrows and skin looked well-detailed, to the point where I had to switch on beautification to hide some of my flaws that day.

Flip to the back and you’ll find a pair of 16-megapixel cameras, both with Sony’s IMX351 CMOS sensor — the same imaging chip inside last year’s V30. The difference between the two cameras inside the G7 is that the main imager has an f/1.6 aperture and optical stabilization, whereas the secondary camera jumps to f/1.9 along with a 107-degree super wide angle. While the super-wide camera here may appear to be a downgrade from the G6’s 125 degrees and the V30’s 120 degrees, LG says it’s focused on delivering super-wide photos with minimal distortion. Based on the few shots I took, it seems that LG has achieved just that.

In low light situations, both of the G7’s rear cameras can toggle a Super Bright Mode which sounds very much like the Bright Mode on the V30S, but apparently delivers twice as much brightness thanks to further optimization all round. This feature combines four pixels into one — aka pixel binning — in order to boost sensitivity. It does mean that you’ll end up with 4-megapixel shots instead of the full 16 megapixels. This isn’t exactly a brand new concept — we saw a similar execution on the second-gen ASUS PadFone Infinity back in 2013. What’s definitely new this time, however, is that LG has applied this to video as well, which uses 4K capture to produce optimized 1080p footage. We’ll be taking a closer look at these when we get hold of a final unit.

Building on top of the eight AI Cam filters found on the V30S, LG teamed up with computer vision company EyeEm to add eleven more to the G7: Baby, Animal, Beverage, Fruit, Sky, Beach, Snow, Group of People, Lowlight, Night Sky and Text. The machine learning engine is trained to recognize 1,162 possible objects, and it tags each image with the appropriate “QTags” — you can see them floating around in the viewfinder when the camera is “thinking” — for sorting into up to 155 smart albums.

In use, it enhanced photos of food, city, beaches, flower, fruits, people and animals just fine in most cases, though it did struggle between “Animal” and “Pet” when I pointed the camera at a cow. Sure, it’s a difficult test, but I preferred the “Pet” mode’s more natural colors, anyway. My only complaint so far is that the camera tended to switch to “Sky” a lot when I was trying to capture general landscape, and the unnaturally blue sky stood out like an eyesore. LG did say that it will continue to improve the performance of its image classification engine over time, so hopefully this won’t be an issue in the near future.

The G7 ThinQ is the most ambitious smartphone from LG since its modular experiments in phones. Its innovative (and loud!) speaker and super bright display are pleasant upgrades and the G7’s dedicated key for Google Assistant is already far more appealing than Samsung’s Bixby button. As for the AI Cam, it’s still a work in progress, but I do enjoy the results when it delivers on its promises.

The rest of the G7 is mainly refinements to solve everyday pain points, while still maintaining many of the best qualities of other LG models, such as durability, headphone output and versatility in photography. Crucially, there’s no exact prices or release dates for the G7 just yet, but the phone is coming first to South Korea “in the coming days”, followed by a roll-out to the US, Europe, South America and Asia. Only time will tell whether the G7’s focus on the fundamentals will be enough to win over fickle smartphone buyers.

Under Armour takes on HQ Trivia with the help of NBA star Steph Curry

Golden State Warriors star Stephen Curry returned to the court after a lengthy absence last night, and Under Armour is giving fans another reason to celebrate. The shoe company will take on the likes of HQ Trivia with Steph IQ: a basketball-themed quiz where players can win store credit, shoes and even NBA playoffs tickets. As you might expect, the kicks are Steph’s own UA sneaker, the Curry 5.

Here’s how it works: During each of the Warriors’ playoff games, Steph IQ will go live when the NBA star sinks his first three-point shot. From there, you’ll have to answer 8 questions — of increasing difficulty, of course — for a chance at the prize pool. Based on the early look UA provided, Steph IQ looks very similar to HQ Trivia and others. Popular basketball personality Bdot will host and you’ll be able to get in on the action on both iOS and Android. Your first chance to give it a go is Friday, when the Warriors take on the Pelicans in Game 3 of the Western Conference Semifinals.

Nikola (Motors) is suing Tesla

Nikola Tesla invented alternating electrical current. Nikola Motors is a mobility company working on a hydrogen-powered semi truck. Tesla makes fully electric vehicles and last December unveiled its EV Semi. Nikola Motors is suing Tesla Motors over patent infringements, according to Electrek. Let the irony of that sink in for a moment before reading the rest of this post.

Okay, all set? Good.

Nikola alleges (PDF) that Tesla infringes on three of its patents: fuselage design, a wraparound windshield on a semi truck and a mid-entry door. Nikola claims that these design similarities have “caused confusion” among customers and stolen away over $2 billion in business, and that if problems arise with Tesla’s Semi (like battery fires or glitches with autonomous driving), they’ll be attributed to Nikola. Typical patent troll stuff.

Unlike most patent troll cases, this one could have merit. Nikola unveiled its hydrogen-powered semi in December 2016. Elon Musk first showed off the Tesla Semi last December. Once you start looking at the drawings in Nikola’s patents, or compare photos of concept vehicles, you’ll see that there are some similarities between the trucks. Nikola also alleges that Tesla reached out to poach an employee and doesn’t hold any patents for its truck design compared to Nikola’s half-dozen.

Where’s that $2 billion in lost business claim come from? The amount Tesla’s stock price jumped after unveiling the Semi and racking up pre-orders from large commercial customers. We’ve reached out to both companies for more information and will update this post should it arrive. Until then, you could always read over the complaint yourself.

Nikola vs Tesla by Fred Lamert on Scribd

Source: Elektrek

Make trippy music in VR with pals (and OK Go)

When I heard that OK Go frontman Damian Kulash was teaming up with VR studio Within to create an interactive music-making experience, I was stoked. But when I checked out Lambchild Superstar: Making Music in the Menagerie of the Holy Cow at the Tribeca Film Festival, I was simply bewildered. Not in a bad way, though. Although it’s not the traditional jam session I was expecting, Lambchild was still a supremely quirky and unabashedly weird trip of discovery and collaboration.

I sing and play piano, and was hoping Lambchild would be a way to rock out with my friends on actual instruments in VR. How naive. The name alone should have been a clue — this features a menagerie and a holy cow, if not at least some sort of young lamb. It’s not your grandmother’s songwriting session.

In Lambchild, you and your friends take on the form of upright walking lamb-like characters, and are surrounded by a ring of “music-making contraptions”. There’s an eel that serves as a sort of guitar, and critters jumping on pipes act as an odd faux synth. Very little of this makes sense — it’s best you don’t question each so-called instrument’s setup.

There isn’t a goal in Lambchild other than to have fun and be creative. It took me quite awhile to learn how to interact with the virtual devices, and frankly if my coworker Devindra Hardawar hadn’t been there in the simulation to guide me along, I might never have figured out what to do. Because he had checked out an earlier preview, Devindra knew which levers to pull and what animals to look out for, and got us to all the best parts. (Hint: Make sure you press the button in the middle and then run over to the cow to pull its tail. It’s worth the effort.)

That ability to share this experience is one of the highlights here, by the way. As we saw with in last year’s Life of Us, interactive multi-player VR is an elevated experience, and Lambchild builds upon this by allowing your pals to join you remotely. They can beam into Menagerie-of-the-Holy-Cow-land from whatever country or city they’re in, and you guys can have a fun playdate together. It’s like joining an MMORPG but in VR.

The version we saw is still not finished, and we can expect more improvements to come. So far, we were only able to try it out with two players at a time, but adding more participants is in the pipeline, along with other updates to the content and gameplay.

There’s no official word yet on when and where Lambchild Superstar will be available, especially since the technology required to support multiple remote players in one VR environment isn’t mature yet. When it does launch, though, get ready for a trippy blast through rainbow-colored musical farts.

Click here to read all the news from Tribeca Film Festival 2018!

Bullet hell shooter ‘Ikaruga’ comes to Switch on May 29th

Ikaruga is beloved (and notoriously difficult) Japanese arcade game from the early 2000s, and now it’s coming to the Nintendo Switch. The developer, Nicalis, revealed this week that the shoot-em-up style game would be priced at $14.99 in the Nintendo eShop. It arrives on May 29th.

Back when it was originally released, Ikaruga was lauded for the strategy that went into playing it. Players could change the color of their clothing to match the bullets being shot at them; if the colors matched, they would absorb the hit. But just one hit from an opposite-colored bullet would destroy your ship.

The Switch version of Ikaruga can be played horizontally or vertically for a more arcade-like experience. The game will feature three difficulty settings and two modes, Arcade and Prototype, the latter of which limits your ammo to the number of bullets you’ve absorbed. The game also allows for a second player to join in co-op mode. You can see a trailer for the game below.

Via: Kotaku

Source: Nicalis

Lyft expands its free ride program to veterans and job-seekers

Last year starting with Hurricane Harvey in Houston, Lyft launched its “Relief Rides” program for folks caught in hurricanes and other emergencies. Now, the ride-sharing company has announced that it will start offering its services in non-emergency situations, too. It has committed $1.5 million to upgrade the program, giving returning veterans and low-income job-seekers access to rides for job interviews, medical visits and more.

Lyft’s original idea was to give the American Red Cross and Houston shelter supervisors a way to coordinate rides during the Harvey disaster on a tight schedule. It also provided rides to evacuation centers during the California fires and after the mass shooting in Las Vegas. It’s also part of Facebook’s Community Help section for businesses and individuals in need, and works with Hitch Health to get in-need patients to doctors.

Lyft will continue with those programs, while expanding its non-crisis programs as well, it said. Much like Uber’s Movement data service, it’s a way to extend an olive branch to cities that are often hostile to ride services. Both companies, but particularly Uber, have been criticized, sued and fined for lax driver background checks and other problems.

Newton Mail for iOS Updates With ‘True Inbox’ to Make Sent Folder Obsolete

Newton Mail today announced an update for its iOS app that aims to make it easier than ever for users to keep track of email conversations by making the “Sent” folder obsolete. Called “True Inbox,” the feature automatically places any sent emails at the top of the Inbox, no matter if the recipient has responded to the message or not.

This treats each email conversation more like a messaging app, with each thread sorted by activity so that any time a response is sent or received, that conversation shifts to the top of the screen. As usual, Newton users can still archive, snooze, star, view read receipts, and more from the new True Inbox, but now “there’s absolute no need to go to Sent folder any more.”

In the blog post announcing the update, Newton designer Umesh Gopinath explained the company’s purpose for getting rid of the Sent folder.

When I start a new conversation, the mail I sent, remained in the Sent folder, till I received a reply. Which meant, I had to still jump between Inbox and Sent folders to follow up on mails. I always wondered why Gmail never thought of it. People found work-arounds for this problem by Auto BCCing mails to themselves to bring sent mails to inbox. Another recent way was to snooze the sent mails. Needless to say, we found all these hacks ugly, non intuitive and cumbersome.

When we designed Read Receipts in Newton to show 2 ticks on a conversation, like a chat app, we felt that the only time it took one step backwards was when I started a new conversation and then had to go to Sent folder to see the ticks. We really wanted to fix this problem. We wanted to truly make email modern.

Newton users will begin seeing True Inbox automatically, but Gopinath mentioned that the update will see a rollout in “phases” to start. Those who don’t want to wait can turn the feature on in Settings > General > Conversation View > True Inbox. Newton Mail is available to download from the iOS App Store for free [Direct Link].

Tag: Newton
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Contact Management App ‘Cardhop’ Gains Support for Smart Groups, Printing Options and More Languages

Cardhop, the popular contacts management app from Flexibits, makers of Fantastical, today received its first major update to introduce new features and new functionality.

For those unfamiliar with Cardhop, it’s designed to turn the standard Apple Contacts app on the Mac into an interactive communications hub, providing you with tools to email, message, tweet, and interface with all of your contacts from one central location.

Today’s 1.1 update to Cardhop introduces Smart Groups, a feature that lets you create a group of contacts based on specific search criteria that updates automatically from details like company, location, link domains, and more.

So, for example, if you add several contacts from the same company, you can have them all grouped up in one easy to access spot.

With printing support, you can print customized envelopes, labels, and lists of contacts, and there’s now an option to include a timestamp when you use Cardhop’s “Notes” feature to add details about a contact.

There are new template preferences for customizing fields and labels for contacts, and when you type into a name field, you’ll now see suggestions for other names in your contacts list.

Finally, today’s update introduces full support for French, German, Italian, Spanish, and Japanese, plus it includes a range of bug fixes and performance improvements.

“We’re very excited to present our first major update for Cardhop,” said Michael Simmons, Co-founder of Flexibits. “With 5 new languages, printing, smart groups, and much more, Cardhop is even more so the contacts app you’ll actually want to use.”

Cardhop for Mac can be downloaded from the Mac App Store for $19.99. [Direct Link] It’s also available from the Flexibits website, where you can get a free 21 day trial to test it out.
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Notch vs. Notch: LG’s New G7 ThinQ Compared to iPhone X

LG is today unveiling its newest flagship smartphone, the LG G7 ThinQ, at an event in New York City. Before the new device’s debut, MacRumors had a chance to go hands-on with it, and we thought we’d compare it to Apple’s flagship smartphone, the iPhone X.

You see, the G7 ThinQ is the first smartphone with an iPhone X-style front notch from a well-known manufacturer that sells devices in the United States. So how does the G7 ThinQ measure up to the iPhone X? Read on and watch the video to find out.

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Other companies like Essential, Huawei, and Chinese manufacturers have previously launched smartphones with notch designs, but LG’s newest device is the highest-profile smartphone to get a notch, and it’s the first notched device that’s going to be widely available in stores aside from the iPhone X.

Because of the notch included at the top, LG’s G7 ThinQ looks quite similar to the iPhone X. As is the style these days, it features a glass and aluminum body, a smaller form factor, minimal bezel, and a 6.1-inch display that’s nearly edge to edge.

Unlike Apple, LG hasn’t quite mastered maximizing screen space. While the bottom of the iPhone X has no bezel, there’s a small chin on the G7 ThinQ. And, of course, at the top of the G7 ThinQ is the infamous notch, which allows LG to get more vertical screen space while still including front-facing camera equipment.

The LG G7 ThinQ has a smaller notch than the iPhone X, and that’s because the notch isn’t doing quite as much. The iPhone X notch houses the entire TrueDepth camera system that enables the secure Face ID biometric authentication that Apple uses, and the G7 doesn’t have an equivalent feature.

Sure, there’s a front-facing camera and an option to use face unlock, but it’s not the secure 3D-based facial recognition Apple uses – instead, it’s much less secure and can be used solely for unlocking the smartphone rather than verifying mobile payments or replacing passwords.

LG did do something with the notch that Apple didn’t – rather than forcing customers to embrace the design, LG gives customers the option to turn off the notch and hide it within a more traditional status bar.

LG’s ThinQ G7 is a decent Android device that has a premium look and feel and many of the features expected of flagship devices: a fingerprint sensor, 16-megapixel dual cameras, a dedicated assistant button (for summoning Google Assistant), water resistance, an AI camera feature to improve photos, and a powerful processor.

As with most smartphones, the question of whether it’s “better” than the iPhone X largely comes down to ecosystem preference. Those who enjoy the openness and customization available on the Android platform will prefer the G7 ThinQ to the iPhone X, while those who are committed to Apple’s ecosystem will see the iPhone X as the better device.

What do you think of the G7 ThinQ’s notched design and the overall trend toward embracing the notch as a way to maximize screen real estate? Let us know in the comments. Stay tuned to MacRumors because we’ll have a detailed comparison of the G7 ThinQ camera and the iPhone X camera coming.

Related Roundup: iPhone XBuyer’s Guide: iPhone X (Neutral)
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Hulu Announces Offline Download Feature Will Include Ads for Users on $7.99/Month Plan

During its Upfronts presentation in New York City today Hulu confirmed that users will be able to download content from the streaming service and onto their mobile devices. This will let subscribers watch shows and films when not near Wi-Fi or a reliable mobile data connection.

The streaming company also confirmed that its offline download solution will be an “ad-supported downloadable content experience” for subscribers of Hulu’s standard $7.99/month Limited Commercials plan. Those who pay for the $11.99/month No Commercials option will still be able to avoid ads offline.

According to TechCrunch, this means that Limited Commercials subscribers will download commercials along with their shows, and “customers won’t have the ability to fast-forward through these offline commercials.” As of now, Hulu has not announced which shows will be available for offline viewing, but it’s likely to be a limited assortment similar to Netflix’s feature for mobile devices.

Netflix originally launched offline viewing for many of its shows and some films in late 2016, opening up a new section on the iOS app for content specifically designated as “Available for Download.” Showtime followed in 2017 with an offline viewing feature that supports the service’s entire TV and movie catalog. Amazon, Starz, and Epix also support offline downloads, but HBO still lacks the ability. Hulu’s will be the first to include ads.

During the presentation, Hulu announced that it has reached 20 million subscribers across all of its business, including on-demand and Hulu with Live TV. That count is up from 17 million in January. Later this month, subscribers will also be able to tell Hulu to “stop suggesting” a show they don’t have any interest in with a new button. “We want you to be in control of the experience. If you don’t like something, you should be able to tell us,” said Hulu’s Head of Experience, Ben Smith.

In regards to a launch date for Hulu’s offline downloads, all the company said was that it will be available sometime during the “2018-2019 Upfront season,” which should mean within the next few weeks.

Tag: Hulu
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