First Glance
The LG Velvet is really a reasonably priced mid-range smartphone. Still, it comes before really inexpensive 5G smartphones are becoming popular, and it might not seem like a horrible value to some people at release.
However, the cost is too expensive, preventing it from receiving a better ranking. The camera array isn’t up to par for the price, and there’s no quad-DAC, which is a fantastic audio technology that we’ve come to rely on in high-end LG devices.
The three components appear to be similar to those of a truly high-end smartphone. The first had previously been discussed. The LG Velvet supports 5G. The LG Velvet also has premium design details, such as a curved face screen, which makes the surrounding screen look smaller. Its massive OLED screen looks close to those of ‘real’ high-end smartphones, even though certain of its specifications are far less spectacular.
So, in the end, the Velvet is a bit hit or miss – equal parts pricey and inexpensive, but also with a value that leans more and more towards the former.
LG Velvet 5G Review: Launch Date & Price
The LG Velvet originally surfaced in May of 2020 and was also viewed as a somewhat different strategy by LG. It urged us to consider Velvet as a remedy for the Samsung Galaxy S20 Plus, but the essential elements of our smartphone are much less completed.
We didn’t have pricing for every location at the time of the review, but it’s currently available for $599 dollars. America is the first AT & T company to offer the phone in 2020, alongside T-Mobile and on Verizon’s schedule.
The flagships, the Oppo Find X2 Pro, as well as the Samsung Galaxy S20 Plus, are much cheaper than the huge-screen 5Gs. But the OnePlus 8 as well as some Xiaomi, Realme & Oppo smartphones are delicious solutions.
LG Velvet 5G Review: Design
When you look at the LG Velvet from the front, you may think it’s a smartphone worth $1,000 bucks or more. It has curved front glass, an extremely large screen, and even the little plastic chunks between both the metal and glass pieces are no more. This can detract from the appearance of a smartphone.
The metal sides form more noticeable lips at the edges, giving them even more individuality than others. The LG Velvet appears and feels luxurious from the outside, but it lacks the trouble-free design of the Samsung Galaxy S20 lineup of smartphones.
But what about the rear? It does have a semi-mirrored shiny appearance and is rather basic. There is no clearly apparent camera bezel, nor is there a visually appealing light-responsive layer behind the glass.
Nevertheless, this is most probably a decision based upon the ‘appearance’ that LG desires for its Velvet. You may also have colors if you’d like them. The LG Velvet is available in blacks and whites (ish), also greenish as well as ‘illusion sunset,’ a crimson gradient shade with the polarizing kick you’d imagine from Honor or Huawei.
One of the LG Velvet’s odd features is a headset port. They are only found on a few high-end smartphones. This phone has it.
However, that is not one of LG’s well-known audiophile-friendly headset ports.
- LG G8
- LG V50 ThinQ
- LG V40 ThinQ
All have a quad-DAC to improve the signal quality supplied to headphones. Those smartphones also have some of the best sound augmentation features in the industry, which are usually best used on these other smartphones.
The LG Velvet makes use of the Qualcomm CPU’s integrated into DAC, as well as the sole sophisticated audio configuration is the ‘LG 3D Sound Engine.’ By incorporating so much spatial information into ‘plain’ sound voice data, it can significantly improve the sound quality of low-sampling audiobooks as well as online radio channels, but it still changes the sound personality of songs too much.
What about the rest? The LG Velvet boasts a reliable in-display fingerprint sensor. It really hasn’t failed to detect a finger once throughout tests that we should be aware of, although it’s not really the quickest. The scanning on the OnePlus 8 is a little faster.
However, after detecting the somewhat slower reaction during our first few hours with the LG Velvet, we soon forgot about the minor lag.
The smartphone also features a good, but not exceptional, stereo speaker system. One driver is seated at the base, while another is seated on the screen. Each has a comparable sound, rather than just the one in front having an essentially only-treble style, as was common a few years earlier.
A Google Assistant button may also be found on select LG V as well as G series smartphones. Users can’t deactivate it or change what the app does with the launcher program, so they expect to call up the Google Assistant sometimes.
Unless you buy it with LG’s Dual Screen cover, the LG Velvet appears to be a perfectly comfortable, though slightly ordinary, smartphone.
For the LG G8X ThinQ and V50, LG created a few of these. With this velvet edition, the style has not altered much, although it is rather uncommon.
Insert the smartphone, and you’ll have an itsy-bitsy screen on the front, as well as a second screen that equals the LG Velvet’s internal screen. With a few programs, this can only ‘stretch your workspace’ like a double display PC arrangement. Chrome is the only one we’ve found somewhat useable, as the large plastic space between the monitors renders it worthless for streaming. However, you can use two applications simultaneously.
After using the LG Dual Screen on and off for over a year, gaming seems to be the only application we keep coming back to. One of the displays can be converted into a virtual controller, which is useful for videogames, including Asphalt 9 as well as Call of Duty: Mobile.
The fingers now no longer obstruct any of the gameplay, bringing the feeling more in line with that of a legitimate portable gaming platform. We certainly feel less guilty about ourselves while using it in public, as opposed to using one of the third-party gamepads that mostly hold up your phone.
Many games are just incompatible with the Twin Display gamepad. Others will necessitate the creation of a customized layout. This component of the phone is also unstable at the time – we certainly hope that it gets fixed as soon as possible.
We saw a handful of nasty lags while playing with the dual display and often it rejected the screens to allow you to utilize the controller on the clunky smartphone side instead of just the slim and lightweight panel. It’s likely that you’ll need to upgrade or something.
However, we always remove the LG Velvet from the case beyond the occasional play session. It increases the smartphone’s weight and thus does not contribute anything, like a complete foldable phone may, to media streaming.
Some pre-order packages are included in the case of the double screen. If you feel like you can obtain it free of charge, it’s a nice addition, but we won’t suggest spending a few hundred bucks on it later.
LG Velvet 5G Review: Display
The LG Velvet’s screen is exceptionally large, with a 20.5:1 aspect ratio, similar to the Sony Xperia 1, and it also has a droplet notch design.
The notch extends the panel further than a few punched holes, but the sheer length of the panel makes it a fact. Alternatively, you can view the regular 16:9 picture with right and left black lines, or complete the screen to the beginning of the notch design by streaming the sale of the sunset or possibly even the lower deck via Netflix.
This grows out a little from top to bottom, but it would still be worse if the whole screen was used by the LG Velvet.
This panel is built by LG with a 6.8″ 1080 x 2460 screen. OLED panels from LG are sometimes not as nice as those from Samsung or the less-recognized Chinese BoEs, but they really are absolutely excellent.
The extra resolution of one of the higher-end options has not been missed. The color is nice, although there are settings for customizing contrast as well as tones. When it’s used outside in the sunlight, the LG Velvet also snaps into a very hot configuration for exceptional visibility in nearly all settings.
HDR and Full HD Netflix were also supported at the launch. The evident lack of a high refresh rate is a disappointment, though. Hence, this one is really a regular 60 Hertz display and it has not the OnePlus 8 or Samsung Galaxy S20 sleek scroll look.
The 60Hz screen has nothing problematic, although it’s an aspect that questions the worth of the smartphone. Neither is LG’s UI the most consistent aesthetically. There are a lot of modifications to do, but an absence of aesthetic uniformity across elements such as the menu settings as well as the drop-down buttons makes it a little bit cheaper.
LG Velvet 5G Review: Camera
Three rear cameras are featured in the LG Velvet 5G. When you consider the relatively high price, the camera technology may be the most significant drawback.
We get the main camera with 48 megapixels, an ultra-wide lens having an extremely large eight megapixels, as well as a depth sensor with a five-megapixel lens.
The quality difference between primary and secondary cameras is not only significant, but the primary cameras are also not jaw-dropping. The Samsung GM2, a 48-megapixel sensor, and an F/1,8 lens are used by the LG Velvet.
Fine details down to pixel level are sometimes fuzzy or dithery in comparison with the leading smartphones, but this is a rough equivalent in sunlight for the OnePlus 8’s primary camera. Some additional obvious errors exist.
The LG Velvet lacks a zoom camera. However, it takes advantage of the primary sensor’s huge graphical fidelity to take 2x magnified photographs at the very same 12-megapixel quality as ordinary pictures. But, zoom photographs really aren’t almost as dramatic as 1x photos, which often lead to over-exposure.
The ultra-wide camera is also very deceptive since the low-resolution lens lacks or over-flushes many small details and features.
Why are we putting so much emphasis on the camera, the LG Velvet?, it can take lovely photos, so it’s always great to capture an extremely broad perspective. But at this price, we demand more. As well as illustrating this, you may not have to rely on pushy Chinese corporations. The Galaxy A51 from Samsung has the same main camera but is substantially less expensive.
The LG Velvet is a good performer in poor lighting. There seems to be a special Night View Setting, where you may capture a picture for significantly longer, but the color accuracy increases.
The night shots aren’t quite as good as those of the Google Pixel 3a XL or the OnePlus 8. Velvet’s pictures appear much softer and almost out of focus in the ultra-low lighting shots.
The video quality of the smartphone is nice, to some degree. Up to 4K, 30 FPS may be shot. And since there is great stability, certainly up to this level, it is possible to record with certainty in all settings.
LG also included Stable Cam settings that make use of the ultra-wide lens as well as significantly more powerful electronic stabilization. Yet, because the wide camera seems to be of considerably poorer quality, regardless if it is stable, the movie really doesn’t seem as nice.
Its front camera includes a 16-megapixel SK Hynix hi-1634 sensor. You wouldn’t have known about the component manufacturer, yet it is the LG Velvet’s second-best lens.
Indoors, in low-light environments, it can depict and keep details such as single eyelashes. Selfies appear softer in low-light situations, but you may utilize the touchscreen as a spotlight to make your face appear sharper.
LG Velvet 5G Review: Performance & Specs
The Snapdragon 765G CPU is the core of the LG Velvet, amongst the most essential CPUs for reducing 5G phones’ costs. Although it may not be another of those affordable smartphones that the Velvet LG is already.
It’s simple to sniff out a reasonably expensive smartphone using a medium-range processor, such as the Snapdragon 765G. However, the gap between both the Snapdragon 865 and this is typically pretty small at the international level. App loading seems to be almost instantaneous as well as the 8 Gigabytes of RAM provides ample headroom to not close the applications altogether but to maintain functioning in something like a standby condition.
The OnePlus 8 feels marginally snappier to us than the LG Velvet on a daily basis, although this is probably due to the faster fingerprint sensor as well as the 90 Hertz touchscreen and the differences in computing power.
When putting the LG Velvet to the test, there is still a significant power gap.
Processor performance is much less influenced by visuals and game performance. In Geekbench 5, the Velvet scored 1,804 points, while the OnePlus 8 ranked at 2,581 points. The disparity is much more evident in their GPU-focused 3DMark numbers.
The LG Velvet earned 2,980 points throughout the Slingshot Extreme test, compared to 7,206 marks for the OnePlus 8. The Snapdragon 765G from Qualcomm is a gaming-oriented processor, yet the visual power of the Snapdragon 865 is still less than half that of the 765G.
How much would gaming be affected by it? lower than you can ever believe. Asphalt 9 still works very well. It goes pretty smoothly and, when the scene is quite packed, there’s probably only a very little lag. Asphalt 9’s settings were jam-packed with everything wonderful. Both PUBG as well as Call of Duty: Mobile perform admirably at ‘elevated’ graphical settings.
LG Velvet 5G Review: Battery Life
The LG Velvet comes with a 4,300mAh battery. This capacity is at the lower end of what is feasible for a phone with a 6.8-inch screen.
It often lasts for a whole day of regular usage, with very little remaining in the cylinder at the climax. Although, if you often play video games as well as spend plenty of time outside, increasing the brightness level of the screen to its maximum level, may cause some battery issues.
On such occasions, you must recharge the LG Velvet throughout the afternoon so that the power does not drain out before you sleep.
It’s hardly a disaster, and it’s not that unusual for thin, huge-display smartphones. However, it really isn’t optimal either. The LG Velvet comes with a relatively quick 25 Watt adapter plus a 9 Watt wireless battery recharging functionality.
LG Velvet 5G Review: Final Thoughts
The LG Velvet is a 5G phone in the mid-range that costs a bit too much in comparison with LG’s last year’s high-end smartphones. The lower power CPU is not as powerful as we imagined it should have been at this cost. However, the back camera array is not that versatile.
The Good
- Curved glass shell
- Good general performance
- 5G is available.
The Bad
- Expensive
- No LG Quad-DAC
- Poor zoom as well as ultra-wide camera modes