[Smartphone review] | LG V20 | Price dropped!

LG V20 is the successor of the majestic Duke of audio, the LG V10. The mix of materials and the awkwardly rugged design, didn't appeal to the seekers of beauty in a smartphone. Has LG done anything drastic to change all that? Find out in this LG V20 review.

Design: The V20 follows a more 'safe' design language this time, unlike the rugged outlandish approach of the V10. The V20 has s smooth aluminum and plastic body with seamless curves and nicely cut grippy edges. The phone is undoubtedly huge, but isn't too slippery in the hand, like a Samsung device. The volume buttons are on the left side.

The power button is on the back, as usual for LG. The USB type C port is on the bottom, alongside the speaker grill and the headphone jack! There's a button in the right bottom side, as I mentioned in my first impressions, which is used to unlatch the back cover. This phone has a remake back panel and a user replaceable battery as well! The phone, with battery, weighs 173 gm and is 7.6 mm thick. It's both narrower and slightly slimmer than its predecessor. Weight is pretty much the same.

Display: The phone has a 5.7' 1440p (QHD) IPS LCD display at 515 ppi. The display produces excellent colors but on a little bit warmer scale. Viewing angles are excellent and there's that small secondary display too, on the top. It has the same features of your recent contacts, shortcut to apps, quick toggles and an always-on text. It's great to have in your phone, but with a screen already so big, I feel it would be more handy, if it was on the bottom of the main screen.

Overall, great sharpness, good saturation and those amazing viewing angles will greet you, everytime you wake the screen. But personally, I think the screen is still lacking the brilliance of a Samsung Amoled panel. There was also a bit of light bleeding along the four corners of the display, which was disappointing. It isn't too, bad but can still become noticable. That's not cool, considering this is a high end premium device:-(.

Extreme Audio capabilities with Quad DAC

Performance: The LG V20 runs on the same processor that we've learned it love on a flagship. A quad core Snapdragon 820 SoC clocked at 2.15 GHz and 4GB of DDR4 RAM. There's an Adreno 530 GPU for graphics and 64 GB of onviard storage. You can further expand this by tossing in an SD card, upto 256 GB.

There's the fingerprint sensor in the rear, which always improves over each LG smartphone iteration. It's more reliable than the G5, but only slightly faster in unlocking. It doesn't drop recognitions even once, which is great to see, since the G5 used to have some problems occasionally. LG's custom UX on top of Android 7.0 Nougat, is a great leap forward compared to any other manufacturer.

Samsung is still preparing it's Nougat update, while LG has already released a phone with the latest OS, out of the box. Split screen multitasking, a baked in feature on Android N works like a charm on the V20 and it's able to handle anything, thanks to that powerful piece of silicon powering it.

The audio from the V20 has to be one of the best and on par with the HTC 10. LG has placed four high quality DACs in this phone. Even without any software equilizer, the V20 handles all kinds of audio formats like a BOSS!

Multimedia Monster!

Camera: The dual cameras sensors on the rear are just as good as thoss on the G5. One is a standard lens and other is a crazy wide angled sensor but lower resolution. You can switch between then and take some gorgeous shots. Spec wise the camera is a 16 mp + 8 mp dual sensors with an f/1.8 and f/2.2 aperture respectively. It's variables of 4K recording at 30 fps. It has made assisted autofocus and also dual LED flash. The front camera is a 5 mp sensor with a smaller f/1.9 aperture.

Though the front sensor seems common on paper, it can take some crisp and beautiful selfies. The camera app has some enhancements too, like there's selective audio recording, either from front or back of the phone's surface.

Dual cameras: Wide angle and standard

The audio zoom from the previous V10, works even more effectively. The app is usually very quick to launch and the solid optics help in low light too. The V20 can take some nice and pleasent shots in artificial lighting. Though they might tend to show some washed out cors sometines, the overall quality is quite commendable.

The camera app did take a while to launch, a few times, and sometimes there would be some delay while switching to video mode. It's pretty frustrating when it happens, but it's nothing a software update can't fix in the coming days.

Battery: The V20 has a removable 3200 mAh battery unit, capable of quick charging. The battery life is pretty good. You can easily get through the day and still have about 25-30% left at dinner time. I'd you're a light user, you can probably squeeze almost 2 days if use out of this. Combined with Android Nougat, it gives excellent standby times. This phone is a thumbs up for everybody, especially if you're a heavy user👍.

Price: Ok, so maybe you wanna buy a V20. You can buy it for about $650 or 43000 INR . A great audio and optically capable smartphone for a price that might be justifiable for some and would be a hefty premium for others. But anyway, it's an excellent smartphone for the price, hands down!


                                                             
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