LG G8X Thin Q

[centermedic]

Anybody else out there have this phone? Just upgraded the wifes phone and so far she likes it. As soon as I get a chance to get some time with it I will post a review.

[S4GRU]

5 hours ago, centermedic said:

Anybody else out there have this phone? Just upgraded the wifes phone and so far she likes it. As soon as I get a chance to get some time with it I will post a review.

I'm still using the G7.  Been a rock solid phone since I bought it September 2018.  Best phone I ever had.  If the G8 is as good as the G7, it should be a solid device.

Robert

[Dkoellerwx]

8 hours ago, centermedic said:

Anybody else out there have this phone? Just upgraded the wifes phone and so far she likes it. As soon as I get a chance to get some time with it I will post a review.

This is the "dual screen" phone yes? I have the LG G8 and it has been a great phone since I got it. Upgraded from the G7 which also was a great phone. The 8x looked interesting, but the only downside I saw was that it dropped back to a FHD screen from a near QHD screen. 

[PythonFanPA]

4 hours ago, S4GRU said:

I'm still using the G7.  Been a rock solid phone since I bought it September 2018.  Best phone I ever had.  If the G8 is as good as the G7, it should be a solid device.

Robert

Same here Robert regarding the G7, on all fronts. My only nitpick is that we never got the Pie update on the Sprint version, but even without it I'm still happy with the performance no question. 

[S4GRU]

6 hours ago, PythonFanPA said:

Same here Robert regarding the G7, on all fronts. My only nitpick is that we never got the Pie update on the Sprint version, but even without it I'm still happy with the performance no question. 

Yeah, I went with the Google Fi version, because I wanted the shimmering Morocco Blue color.  It did end up getting the Pie Update too. 

Robert

[Trip]

The G8X with the second screen definitely looks intriguing, but I feel like it'd be a gimmick that I would try out once or twice, then remove from my phone and never use again. 

I'm still on my G6 because there wasn't a Black Friday deal that looked sufficiently good to make me want to buy something new. 

- Trip

[PythonFanPA]

Courtesy of info/tip-off from Trip in the V60 thread, great deal on this phone right now via Best Buy for anyone interested:

https://www.bestbuy.com/site/lg-g8x-thinq-black-sprint/6383371.p?skuId=6383371

I bit on it, will be picking it up next week.

[Trip]

4 minutes ago, PythonFanPA said:

Courtesy of info/tip-off from Trip in the V60 thread, great deal on this phone right now via Best Buy for anyone interested:

https://www.bestbuy.com/site/lg-g8x-thinq-black-sprint/6383371.p?skuId=6383371

I bit on it, will be picking it up next week.

It says sold out now.  I didn't decide to order it in time; hoping it comes back in stock before the sale ends.

- Trip

[PythonFanPA]

In case it does, it should be noted for anyone interested:  the deal is only for the phone itself, not the dual screen setup.

[twospirits]

That Best Buy deal of $6.26 a month for 24 months is pretty neat.

the small print says "Total savings of $598.80 includes $200.00 Best Buy instant discount and $16.61 a month carrier bill credit for 24 months. Bill credits end when phone balance is paid off." 

So if the price of the phone is $799.99 and there is a discount savings of $598.80 = $201.99 and if the monthly payment is $6.26 for 24 months ($150.24) the final balance is $51.75 or am I calculating this wrong?

 

Wish it came with the dual screen attachment.

[PythonFanPA]

Ah had stopped checking until you posted TS, it kept showing consistently sold out.   Glad to see its available again, for those that might want to pick one up.

Your math right but I'm not sure where the other ~$50 is coming from on their end.  You *do* have a $30 activation fee plus tax, but that's not part of the phone cost.  Also for some reason on my order the monthly payment showing is actually $6.27 vs. $6.16, but that's only $2.64 difference all total.

[Trip]

Looks like it's back in stock, but ship-to-store only.

EDIT: Ordered mine!  And one for my sister-in-law as an early b-day present.

- Trip

[PythonFanPA]

2 hours ago, Trip said:

Looks like it's back in stock, but ship-to-store only.

EDIT: Ordered mine!  And one for my sister-in-law as an early b-day present.

- Trip

Picked mine up yesterday and finished up transitioning everything over to it/setting up apps/etc.   Love it so far, which I still like the G7 too, but one thing that's an instant improvement for me is the always-on display - not only is it finally sufficiently bright compared to prior LG phones that had this (dating back to the G5), it actually has *color* to it on the clock part.  I know for some that's probably like an 'eh...big deal' reaction, but the AOD was always kind of a love-hate thing for me before because no matter if I maxed the brightness setting before it was always still too dim to me.

The other thing I've noticed in instant comparison (admittedly less than 24 hours in however) is that the battery drain even with all my apps reloaded on the G8X is considerably less thus far.  Heck the thing sits on 100 for a good 30-45 minutes on a full charge before it moves off that at all.  From 6:45am to now I'm only at 88% and that's with several reboots/fair amount of app setup play.

Also oddly, here in Shentel land and sitting at home in the basement like I always do, I suddenly had SCP reporting T-Mobile LTE Band 66 this afternoon - not sure if that's purely a coincidence or the new phone (or both), but have never seen more than the very very rare B4 connection show up for them before.

[PythonFanPA]

Also as a side note, I can't recommend this SupCase Unicorn Beetle Pro line of rugged cases enough (this one for the G8X, I had one on my G7 too):

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0832Q6C2N/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o01_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1&pldnSite=1

[PythonFanPA]

5 days in - loving this phone.  If I don't plug in my phone at work now all day, by the time I'm walking out I'm maybe at 85% still worst case depending on how much I may have had time to use the thing through the course of a busy day.  With the G7 depending on usage that might have been 40-55% before.  The larger G8X battery size vs. the G7 accounts for some of that, but I can also say at least both at work and at home combined (with caveat of where I live), this is a notably better all-around in-building RF performer in my experience thus far than the G7 was too in terms of if I make a call from my desk.  The doubled internal storage size is a huge plus as well.

Negatives:  The above having been said, apparently LG no longer supports moving apps to SD card with this phone (not sure if that's also true of the regular G8) - not a huge issue but the total lack of option is still a negative comparatively.  The change from back button to in-screen (bottom) fingerprint sensor is a qualified negative - the G7's hardware based sensor could be finicky as well, but the in-screen sensor definitely has its moments where you can nail it exactly the right spot 5 times in a row and still have to unlock via your alternative method.

[Trip]

Really glad to hear it's a better RF performer.  My G6 is very disappointingly bad in that department, and not being able to test that with the G8X, I had been concerned that I might have been locking myself back into another phone with poor RF performance.  Any sense of how much better it is? 

Thankfully, your negatives don't sound deal-breaking to me.  I don't use fingerprints, and I'm not sure that I've moved any apps onto my SD card.  I basically use my SD card for pictures, however rare those are, and music.

Still waiting for mine to arrive at Best Buy for in-store pick-up later this week.  They wouldn't ship it directly to me for some inexplicable reason.  ("Shipping is unavailable in your area."  I've never heard something that made less sense.)  Must be important to make sure to maximize customer chances of picking up COVID-19.

- Trip

[twospirits]

I'm sure most of you that got this phone has probably seen every video imaginable made about it, but this reviewer covers so much that I have not seen covered elsewhere. She truly showcases the neat things the phone can do. 

 

[Trip]

I'm not going to have the second screen, so none of the things in that video really do much for me.

- Trip

 

[Trip]

Picked mine up Thursday, activated it Friday, and have some initial impressions.

Good: 

PythonFanPA is 100% right, this is a much better RF performer.  I would say it's probably 3-5 dB better, at least, than the G6 was.  I see more LTE more often, including roaming.  I'm currently out in the sticks once again, and where I used to see -106 dBm on Shentel 1X with LTE at -117 dBm or so from US Cellular LTE roaming that would frequently drop, this phone is currently at -102 dBm on Shentel 1X (from a different tower) and -110 dBm on LTE roaming.  It's enough to make it usable for tethering in a stable manner, something that always gave me problems in the past.  (Nicer to use my phone's unlimited data rather than eat up the 10GB on the hotspot here.)  I've been using it for more than two hours now without issue.

App performance is far and away faster and better than the G6.  I don't think I realized just how sluggish the G6 really was until I had my G8X in-hand.  It's pretty impressive.

I like the screen a lot more than the old phone, though I can't quite put my finger on why.  Perhaps better color gamut?

I like the size a lot.  It's somewhat taller, but only a touch wider, which makes for a fit in the hand that is consistent with my G6.  It is, however, wide enough that it only barely fits in my phone holder in the car--but it fits, which is what's important.

Disabling the extra button on the left side of the phone was painless.  Shame it can't be remapped to something useful.

Home screen now allows for more columns for apps, so I can fit more on a page.  Very pleased about this.

Much more internal storage.  My G6 had like 10GB available or something, so even though I was offloading pictures and whatnot to my SD card, it was still almost always full.  Now it has more than 100GB available, which is more breathing room than I should ever need.

Bad:

I'm missing the power button on the back a lot.  I keep trying to press it and there's nothing there, then I have to go hunt for the button on the side.  I assume I'll get used to this.

The LG default keyboard no longer seems to allow you to long-press for symbols.  Given that I use symbols in most of my passwords, this is unacceptable.  I've now switched to SwiftKey, at least for now, though it seems less accurate than the LG keyboard it replaced.  (If there's a way to turn it on in the LG keyboard, please let me know.)

Ugly:

I suspect everything else I absolutely abhor about this phone is not exclusive to the G8X and has more to do with general Android 9 having a number of very crappy design choices, which is nothing new for Google.  It feels unfair to knock the G8X for them, except that LG does some amount of customization and should be able to fix these issues even if Google makes stupid choices.

The notification bar, or whatever it's called, no longer stays a consistent color, so in most apps, it is impossible to see what SCP is doing at a glance.  I've tried both the built-in setting to force the color, as well as apps that change the background color, but the former doesn't work most of the time, while with the letter, the color of all the other icons still change with the app in use, so I can't see the clock or anything--so if I use it on an app that would have turned the bar white, then ONLY SCP is visible.  What a headache.

Similarly, the navigation bar at the bottom used to be black, as it should be, but is now gray.  This is certainly unpleasant to look at, but is made worse by the fact that the buttons seem to change color with the apps, so in Twitter, for example, the buttons are the same color as the background and thus cannot be seen.  Someone failed to do any amount of testing on this, it would seem.  Attempts to fix this have been similarly unsuccessful.

The clock has moved to the left, which I knew about, but there is no option to move it back to the right, as far as I can tell.  There's plenty of space there to do so, which leaves me puzzled about why it's not available as an option.  Moreover, the notch looks ridiculous and there seems to be no option to simply make that entire row of the screen black and move the whole notification bar down to eliminate the notch entirely, which would solve the problem that I don't even have.  Again, lousy UI choices and lack of options degrade the user experience.

And, of course, still waiting for Mike to see my posts about not being able to import/export with SCP.  Hopefully it's an easy fix.

Conclusion:

If I could have gotten this phone with Android 8, it would be a nearly perfect phone, as it would have fixed all of the "Ugly" items and one of the two "Bad" items.  From a hardware and performance perspective, this is a great device, and I would very much recommend it. 

Unfortunately, as is typical these days of many software projects, each new version removes features, makes absurd and irrational design choices, and makes using the device more difficult and less pleasant, making for a degraded user experience.  And, in order to use my RSA Token for work, I can't even root it to replace the OS and fix the issues.  Very unfortunate.

As I use it more, I may add additional comments.

- Trip

[PythonFanPA]

Trip:  good writeup.  Much of your complaints, its hard for me to identify with (or it just doesn't really bother me, aka the notch factor or the clock positioning) as I have exclusively for several phone generations now used both (a) Swiftkey and (b) Nova Launcher, so I'm used to Swiftkey certainly and always customize the layout/etc to my preference (and have prediction history as well that's tied to my Gmail account) and get a consistent experience there.

And, consistency of experience especially plays in with the Nova Launcher usage....I always read/hear reviews about how bad LG's home screen/etc are, but i never bother experiencing them anyway because I prefer to stick with what I know - which also has a *ton* of customization ability within it.  I used it dating back to Samsung GS phones (the 5 is the last one I used I think before I flipped to the LG G5 in early 2016), so regardless of which brand of Android you're using, if you save/import your layout from your prior phone after you've restored all the apps you've created shortcuts for, other than maybe re-configuring widgets if you use those, you're good to go almost immediately.  If you've never tried it, I highly recommend it.

[Trip]

I just tried Nova Launcher and it didn't seem to do anything about any of my complaints, unfortunately.  Lots of options for the home screen, but did nothing when actually in apps, which is where the problems arise.

- Trip

 

[Trip]

Okay, so I just tried actually comparing side-by-side with my G6, and this is really puzzling.  I'm wondering if it's an SCP bug of some sort; my old phone actually had the same behavior of changing the colors of both the status bar and the navigation bar, but SCP had different colors for its icons depending on the status bar color and had black instead of gray navigation bar color.

- Trip

[PythonFanPA]

I never really noticed what color the bar at the bottom of SCP ever was....again for me it wouldn't really matter/bother me.  I do note it's not black on my end with the G8X (while the rest of the SCP screen is) however....although it'd call it almost white moreso than grey on my end.  And I can still clearly make out the navigation buttons without issue.

Outside of Twitter and SCP, can you give an example of a more maintreamish/common app you're looking at where you absolutely can't see the navigation buttons?  I've tried flipping through a couple of different apps, and while I can see differential in color, I've yet to find one where the navigation buttons couldn't be made out/blend in to the extent you described in your long post.

[Trip]

42 minutes ago, PythonFanPA said:

I never really noticed what color the bar at the bottom of SCP ever was....again for me it wouldn't really matter/bother me.  I do note it's not black on my end with the G8X (while the rest of the SCP screen is) however....although it'd call it almost white moreso than grey on my end.  And I can still clearly make out the navigation buttons without issue.

Outside of Twitter and SCP, can you give an example of a more maintreamish/common app you're looking at where you absolutely can't see the navigation buttons?  I've tried flipping through a couple of different apps, and while I can see differential in color, I've yet to find one where the navigation buttons couldn't be made out/blend in to the extent you described in your long post.

In SCP it's definitely a light gray, but I don't think it's white either.  But it used to be black, and having it not black meant it kept drawing my attention when I had my phone in my car's holder with SCP open.  At a stop, I set the bar to auto-hide just so it would stop distracting me from the road.  (I keep my phones on such holders so the GPS works properly.)

I'm not sure what was happening Saturday in Twitter, but it seems better now.  I can't find another app that's doing it.

- Trip

[mideastbeast]

Here's a silly question. I bought one without the dual screen. When I made a phone call the buttons at the bottom grey'd out and were not useable. The shade at the top would not come down. Only way I could make a call and go back home was to click the 3 little buttons top right and click on "Contacts" and that would let me get to contacts then back to the home page. I returned the phone for a refund.

This might seem obvious but did I get a bum unit or is this normal?