phone 27 – lg v50s thinq 5g

if you happen to read the first post on this series, the introduction and benchmark plans, then you have an idea that the number of phones i buy depends on my age. in 2020, i turned 27. making me think back about the criteria in buying and eventually keeping a phone – novelty and usability. and when i saw a video of somegadgetguy or juan bagnell talking about a certain phone, i knew what to get. ye, the lg v50s thinq 5g. and i cannot have the entire experience without the dual screen – an accessory that i think, is really, a necessity.

this post will be too long if i am going to discuss all the use cases i have been enjoying on the phone. it is a good replacement to my z5 premium as the productivity on this phone is on another level. but i already set up my xperia 1 ii for that purpose, a work phone. this phone, then, is neither a work phone nor a personal phone. the latter is still the newly bought xz2 compact. nuff said, battery test!

last year, 2020, i managed to test battery charging on this phone. it is quite slow filling up the empty battery for 3 hours and 45 minutes. i wonder why it did that way, because this 2021, the phone was filled up for only 2 hours, 20 minutes and 15 seconds. that is not as fast as that on xperia 1 ii, but certainly good “on my paper”. the battery life is where i am impressed with this phone, thinking that it will not go over the battery life on xperia 1 ii. but for the sake of “standard”, i detached the dual screen. it is similar to what i did to nokia lumia 1020. i detached the battery grip so it wont add up more juice, battery testing is just for the handset itself. i detached the dual screen to just measure the battery drain on the handset itself. using the dual screen will drain the battery faster. even so, i will also talk about the experience of using the dual screen on the use cases i considered for this battery testing – music play, web browsing, gaming, photo shoots, video recording and video play. with that, the phone impressively lasts for 2 days, 2 hours and 18 minutes. which is way longer than my xperia 1 ii. the screen on time reads 11 hours and 18 minutes, while on xperia 1 ii, 9 hours. i also turned off any battery savings on this phone, like i also turned off stamina mode on xperia 1 ii. i guess, this is a fair testing, then. somehow.

battery score card

music play is good on this phone. i find the location of the dual speakers weird – bottom and on the ear piece. and the sound separation on default is different too. but there is a way to set up how the loudspeaker pump out sounds, in a way that makes it similar to other phones having left and right separation. it is loud enough, bass is just okay. wireless audio is also good. actually better than the loudspeakers. the best part? the wired audio. this is my first phone to have a quad dac. i am not really an audiophile. listening to mp3 files on v50s and xperia 1 ii is similar, there are just some frequencies that are prominent on each one. they seem to have different priority for quality audio. but it is almost unnoticeable. the time when i appreciated the quad dac on the phone, is when i play flac. i have too few of them. but, sure, the difference is more obvious here. and there are even controls on the v50s to render the sound in different ways. as for the dual screen experience – the sound is not affected of course. but putting the music app on one screen to make the controls active, and doing other things on the other screen, is nice. also, making it look like a laptop showing the music app, is nice too. nice nice.

web browsing is where the dual screen is not just a nice nice thing to have. it is also a way better experience. web pages look good on the display along with the images on those pages. it is great, that is if you have not experienced web browsing on a phone with 4k display. extending the pages on both screens are good too, for that tablet experience. but i find it not appealing when the phone is handled vertically. hold it horizontally, then that would look like a nintendo ds or that asus laptop that has a smaller display below the bigger display. it is not similar to foldable phones. there is a gap in between like on the two aforementioned devices. what is better? use the whale browser! basically, it is intended for browsing a list of links on one screen, and one of the pages on the lists to the other screen. online shopping is one. say, you search on one display. results will be shown. show one of the results on the other display. this is one of the things i usually do on a computer with an extended display. on the index page, i open a link on a new window and drag that to the extended display. it is very efficient on v50s. just double click the link, and the linked page will open on the other display. in that way, the index page is still active and viewable along with the opened page. i wonder if there is a browser for windows platform that is as efficient as this – no extra click and resizing of windows.

gaming is similar to the gaming performance of my xperia xz2 compact and xperia 1 ii. but just like those, i did not maximize its use for the test as i only played subway surfer on it. though i also played some other games prior to testing the battery life. i did not experience lag nor a significant time when opening the games. the phone also has a gaming mode. and this is another use case where the dual screen is good at. you can enable one of the screens to handle the controls. if a certain game does not support an external controller, you can just map the screen of one to another. just place a virtual button on the second screen corresponding to the placement of controls on the main screen. it does make the experience similar to what you get with an attached controller. except that your controller is also a screen which is still quite different. okay. similar, but it is still different.

the camera system is another thing that v50s is good at. it is something that i had not experienced even on lg g4. the camera system is feature rich. photo shots are good. one thing that sets it apart from my previous phone is the high dynamic range. xperia 1 ii also has this option, even the xz2 compact. but v50s is quite aggressive more than those two. sometimes, it is way aggressive to my liking, but at least there is a way to turn it off. i just find two different ways of hdr photos on xperia 1 ii more controlled. the camera quality is also great. the artifacts i saw on lg g4 when zoomed in are not in v50s, instead it became less sharp. but the looks of it, it is great for social media and even for printing and editing. the manual camera is here too. not only for photo shoots but also for video recording. there are a lot of controls that you can do for manual video recording. you can also manually tweak the sounds, so that you can provide not only a controlled visual output, but also the audio side. this is one of the things making v50s a device that is worth to keep. it does an excellent job, ideal to content creators. though, i am not one of them.

video play is a hit or miss on my preference, though. one prominent negative experience i have on this phone is the presence of a notch. this is my first phone to have such and my eyes are drawn to it when i am using the fullscreen. for 16:9 and 18:9 contents, it is not much of an issue. but when i play 21:9 contents, movies that i have or videos taken with phones, i have to zoom out so that the notch will not get into the view. that means there are black bars, acting like bezels, on all four sides. and i prefer that over the notch interrupting the viewing experience. another thing is, the screen resolution is quite low, especially when you have been using a phone with a 4k ips display. sharpness of 1080p on an oled is quite low. watching fhd videos may not be an issue, but watching your own 4k video is quite underwhelming. good thing is, colors are good. it can even be tweaked depending on how you want contents be shown. if you get pass the mentioned issues, you will enjoy watching videos on the device. consider the dual screen again. there is no need for a kickstand since you can position the dual screen to mimic a laptop. it has continuous variable angle, too. likewise, it does not matter which screen you want to use for watching since they have similar quality – resolution and color rendering. add up the descent speaker.

from this test, i can say that, overall, this phone is an excellent device. attaching a similar screen to that of main screen opens ways on how to do things, you have been doing, in an efficient way. productivity is another level, too. there are many things you wish you can do on a multiwindow display, but cannot. this phone grants such wish.

i remember the same sentiments i wrote on my review for lg g4. i still feel the same way while reviewing this phone. this phone works as an ordinary flagship phone, but when you attached the “accessory” screen, it opens a different experience.

it definitely fits what i am looking for in a collectible phone – the novelty and the usability that i never thought will surpass any other regular phones out there. and never thought that a phone really excels on both.