LG V50 ThinQ Hit Two Trends With One Stone

At the beginning of the week, we went through the LG Premiere announcements – the V50 ThinQ and G8 ThinQ were the companies’ product launches this year and by now, the phones’ specs aren’t a mystery anymore.

After seeing the LG V50 ThinQ up close, we can definitely say the company tried to hit two 2019 mobile trends with one stone… ahem, phone. But did they succeed?

At first glance, the V50 ThinQ is a polished, sleek smartphone. It has the dreaded notch, but it is narrower than the one on Apple’s last iPhones and it has very thin bezels, so we let it go. Especially since what’s inside the phone is what matters. LG equipped the V50 ThinQ with Qualcomm’s latest chip, the Snapdragon 855, and the X50 modem, so you’ll finally be able to buy a real, in-the-flesh 5G phone this year.

Sprint has jumped on the bandwagon with LG but depending on the country you live in, you might not be able to access 5G immediately after purchase. Mobile operators are still holding all the cards. Don’t fret – when 5G is not available, the phone can revert to 4G LTE.

The other trend LG has tried to follow this year was foldable displays. Instead of coming up with their own folding design, the company played it safe and offered a dual-screen add-on.

The secondary display is also an OLED and attaches to the phone like a case. Patrick tried it out at the booth and it works remarkably well; just like having two monitors at home, there are no latencies, no glitches of any sort. The secondary display seems to be glued to the phone, but we didn’t have it with us for a long period of time to comment on its sturdiness.

We did, however, multitask like crazy with it! We tried emailing on one side, while opening documents on the other; chatting and watching a video in the same time; opening a game and controlling it. In fact, for mobile gamers, the biggest use case could be exactly that – the OLED display turns into a touch-sensitive game pad. With DTS:X aboard, the gaming experience should be awesome on the V50 ThinQ!

Bottom line: To answer our question before, LG V50 ThinQ is definitely a crowd-pleaser. It struck the balance between real innovation and gimmicks. Instead of delivering a foldable phone that can’t be touched or used right now – as we’ve seen a couple of companies do here – it offered users an option, letting them decide when to use it. Meanwhile, LG realized the importance of 5G and ensured the phone would have the processing power, battery and heat dissipation system to support the new connectivity wave.