LG Announces the G7 ThinQ with a Screen Notch and Camera AI

After leaking some of the details itself, LG has finally taken the wraps off its newest smartphone. The LG G7 ThinQ (yes, that’s actually the name) matches all the leaks from unofficial sources. It has some things we expect out of the G-series, including a dual camera and high-resolution LCD panel. However, it also borrows features from the competition — there’s a notch, and “AI” in the camera. The G7 ThinQ looks like a perfectly fine phone, but fine might not be enough in 2018.

The first thing you’ll probably notice about the G7 ThinQ is that screen. It’s a 6.1-inch LCD with a resolution of 1440 x 3120. That works out to a 19.5:9 ratio, which is taller than phones like the Galaxy S9 or Pixel 2 XL. LG also says this panel can hit 1,000 nits of brightness, which is in the same neighborhood as the Galaxy S9. You might notice the bezels are not symmetrical on the G7. Unlike the iPhone X, this device has a “chin” in addition to a notch. That kind of defeats the purpose — unless the purpose is to look like a bad iPhone clone.

The notch is, of course, a design popularized by Apple last year with the iPhone X, and several Android device makers have created their own versions of the notch. LG will allow you to “turn off” the notch in software, but that just means filling the screen on either side with black instead of whatever UI is on the screen. That might look a bit weird with an LCD that lacks the perfect black levels of OLED.

LG is also talking up AI in the G7 ThinQ, but there’s not much to it. The camera can recognize specific objects and suggest filters. This is identical to the V30S ThinQ that LG announced at MWC, and there’s no hardware aspect like with Huawei’s camera AI. That phone has a neural network core in its CPU for AI processing. LG simply licensed a computer vision system from a third-party and slapped it in the camera.

One undeniably handy feature of the G7 ThinQ is the Assistant button. It’s on the left edge of the phone. You can press that at any time to pull up Google Assistant and issue voice commands. It’s sort of like Samsung’s Bixby Button, except useful. It’ll also ship with Android 8.0 Oreo.

The G7 ThinQ includes all the flagship-level internals you’d expect, like a Snapdragon 845, 4GB of RAM, and 64GB of storage. Interestingly, the battery is only 3,000mAh. With a 6.1-inch LCD, that battery might struggle to keep up with devices like the Galaxy S9+. The internal speaker, as previously described, will reportedly be 10 times louder than other phones.

LG hasn’t provided pricing for the G7 ThinQ yet, but it’ll probably be similar to the Galaxy S9. It’ll be on carriers in the coming weeks.

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