Before Huawei rose to prominence in 2017 as a viable challenger to the Apple-Samsung smartphone duopoly, LG -- South Korea’s other tech giant -- was the main challenger to the big two. LG’s phones were never as polished as the iPhone or Samsung’s Galaxy, but they often had superior technology and more practical features.
But recently the company has struggled, thanks to a relatively small marketing budget and one bad gamble in 2016 (in the form of a modular phone that flopped spectacularly) that set the company back in the minds of mainstream consumers. Since then, LG’s phones have flown under the radar, getting a fraction of the coverage as Apple’s and Samsung’s flagships.
That’s a shame, because the LG V30 is the company’s best phone yet, and would be my personal favorite phone of 2017... were it not for one glaring flaw.
About that screen...
That flaw is, quite frankly, not a huge deal, and most average people won’t mention it. But in a crowded market, where every little edge counts, consumers can afford to nitpick if something isn’t quite right. And there’s a little problem with the V30’s screen.
The handset has an OLED panel produced in-house by LG. OLED displays are prized for their vibrant colors and deep, inky blacks, producing a contrast regular LCDs can’t achieve. But the downside is some OLED screens look, well, “off” when viewed from any angle that isn’t directly in front of the display. The V30’s screen suffers from this: It has a noticeable blue tint when viewed at an angle. It sounds minor, because a lot of the time you are indeed looking directly at your phone’s screen -- but given how often we use smartphones, there are plenty of times where you aren’t, and that’s when this issue pops up.
While it’s not uncommon to have this problem with OLED displays, Samsung has managed to calibrate its screens so the colour shift is not as noticeable -- and the iPhone X also uses a display from Samsung too, meaning LG lags both of its rivals here. Still, an imperfect OLED screen is still superior to LCDs, so the V30’s screen is still better than 90% of the phones you see out on the street (including all non-X iPhones).
With the bad out of the way, let’s talk about the good. Those bezels that wrap around the V30’s 6-inch display are the slimmest among Android handsets, just a hair slimmer than the bezels on Samsung’s flagship. And if you factor in the iPhone X’s notch, the V30 actually has the best screen-to-body ratio of any phone on the market right now. If you’re excited by the current industry push towards all-screen phones, the V30 tops the list here.