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Hot on the heels of the Galaxy Note8, LG's V30 — announced at IFA in Berlin — looks to be the strongest competition that Samsung has ever had. A massive 6-inch display, dual rear cameras — including the brightest camera ever on a phone — and some serious hi-res audio chops should make for one hell of a high-end Android phone.
The V30 is the best — and best-looking — phone that LG has made yet. That much is obvious. Think of it as the successor to both last year's V20 and the G6 combined, with a 18:9 ratio OLED display that stretches almost the entire length of the phone. With a centre-mounted fingerprint reader on the rear, the front is just screen with two small top and bottom bezels. At 7.3mm thick and weighing 158g, LG says the V30 is the lightest 6-inch-plus phone out there.
Where Samsung and Apple have gone for a mix of standard wide-angle and telephoto sensor and lens combos for the dual-camera setups on their phones, the V30 has a super wide-angle (120 degrees) 13-megapixel f1.9 lens and a standard (71 degrees) 16-megapixel f1.6 lens, the latter of which is the fastest and brightest of any camera phone we've seen yet and has OIS. What LG's camera app looks like remains to be seen, but the hardware sounds solid. That camera also captures high dynamic range and log gamma curve video, which should preserve more detail than regular recording.
In raw hardware, the V30 impresses across the board. That OLED screen is a 2880x1440, its processor is the current top-spec Qualcomm Snapdragon 835, and like other premium LG phones the V30 has a hifi-grade quad DAC setup and comes with bundled earphones in the box from B&O Play. It also supports the MQA streaming hi-res audio format, the first phone of its kind to do so. And, being an Android 7.1.2 device, it supports the Google Assistant out of the box.
Every feature that other high-end competitors have, the V30 seems to have as well; you get IP68 water resistance, Gorilla Glass 5 on the front and back, wireless charging and Qualcomm's Quick Charge 3.0. The phone goes on sale internationally on September 21 in a 64GB storage capacity, as well as a 128GB variant called the V30+. Local release and pricing has yet to be detailed, with LG Australia saying it will share the information "as soon as it become available".
