Friends+Design
- Sleek, matte glass, premium finish
- Light, yet reassuringly solid design
- For a phone with a large 6.4-inch screen, it is pretty comfortable to hold (it's noticeably lighter and narrower than the Note 9 and XS Max)
- Water resistant (IP68 rating)
- Handy physical button for Google Assistant
- Like all glass designs, it is prone to smudges
- The metal sides tend to heat up a bit under stress
Display
- Excellent OLED screen - the blacks are especially inky and dark
- Minimal bezels with small (ish) notch
- The notch is hide-able, if you don't like the V40's screen cutout
Software
- LG's software interface continues to get better and more optimized - while it’s not as simple/clean as stock Android, it’s miles ahead of where LG was just a few years ago
- Some add-ons likes the optional "floating bar" tab for quick access to your contacts, music player, etc are handy
Performance
- Equipped with the power beast Snapdragon 845 chipset, the V40 is as fast and responsive with day-to-day tasks as other top-tier, flagship phones
Camera
- The LG V40's five cameras (3 rear + 2 front) give you a variety of photography options
- Its rear camera setup includes a standard lens with optical image stabilization, a wide-angle lens and a telephoto lens with 2x zoom that takes dramatic, bokeh-style portraits
- LG also loaded the camera with a bunch of lighting tools for portrait photos, nearly identical to the ones on the latest iPhones, which adds a studio-like quality to your pictures
- Overall image quality is very good, and in the same league as other top camera phones of the world - the iPhone XR/XS, the Google Pixel 3/XL, and the Galaxy Note 9
- Class leading video-recording options, excellent end results too
- Good set of front cameras too - with especially good portrait selfies - Skin tones are also true to life and faces look sharp
- Lots of software extras are enabled by the versatile camera setup, like Triple shot (allows you to take three photos on each of the rear cameras with one tap of the shutter - the phone will save three images and stitch together the pictures in an animated, zooming GIF), Cine shot (makes cinemagraphs, wherein a portion of a "still image" is repeatedly in motion while the rest of the picture remains static, resulting in hypnotizing and surreal images), Animated emoji (a la iPhones), AI scene detection, and Google Lens (calls up information on objects right from the V40's camera lens using Google's vast search database)
- If you're into photography, having this Swiss-army-knife style set of options at your disposal is useful (and fun)
- But if you're more of a casual photographer, all the camera features on the V40 can get overwhelming - it's not quite the just-pickup-the-phone-and-click-a-great-picture experience as say the Pixel 3 or the iPhone XR/XS are
Audio
- Has a headphone jack - something that's becoming more and more rare in the flagship segment today
- Exemplary overall audio quality and great sounding speaker setup (it's not stereo though)
- There's some fancy audio tech: the phone has a built-in DAC, which improves audio for your headphones -- especially with high-end lossless audio - the V40 also supports 7.1-surround audio via DTS X support - this gives you the option to tweak how songs sound from multiple directions, as if the source was coming from in front of you or side-to-side, on your wired headphones
Battery
- Decent overall battery life with a 3300mAh battery - will give you a day of use with moderate to heavy usage
- Compared to other flagship peers though, the V40 is towards the bottom of the list here - given the large display it would have been better for LG to opt for a 4000mAH battery which would have allowed it to compete better
Verdict
- Overall, the V40 is an excellent phone, and probably the best one LG has ever made - it won’t appeal to everyone — you have to be a fan of big phones, for starters, and software purists will still be happier with a Pixel — but in a world where smartphones are becoming increasingly similar, the V40 differentiates itself with its unique camera system and pulls it off in style
