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LG is spreading around a new coat of paint for its Android smartphones in South Korea.
LG is having a hard time pushing timely software updates even to its flagship range, despite having a dedicated Software Upgrade Center for this exact purpose. The South Korean brand did begin updating a few of its V- and G-series phones to Android 10 in the last couple of months, but not all these releases have yet to see international availability, and many users remain clueless as to when the update notification might pop up on their LG handsets. To smooth their ruffled feathers, LG Italy recently published its Android 10 update roadmap.
LG has only recently released its newest flagship, the V40 ThinQ. While the device offers some generous specs, including a Snapdragon 845, 6GB of RAM, and a triple camera setup, it sadly lacked the latest version of Android when it was launched back in October 2018. This started to change in May as the phone received Pie on Verizon. Now, V40 users on AT&T can look forward to the same update, with the OTA rolling out after slowly trickling down to some users over the past few days.
It wasn't that many years ago that LG was releasing the first phone with Nougat, but times have changed. Now, LG is unusually slow to update its phone, even with that fancy new upgrade center! Well, at least owners of the v40 ThinQ on Verizon can enjoy an update today, late though it may be.
The latest update to the ever-popular Action Launcher includes a new search feature that's been a year in the making. Version 40.0 includes Action Search, a powerful new tool that serves results from the web, your apps and contacts, your in-app search history, and your settings (from both your phone and Action Launcher itself). Also included is a snazzy new app icon.
LG's update performance as of late has been less than stellar. Despite the formation of a "Software Upgrade Center" several years back, the company is still slow to get new versions of Android out the door. The V40 is still waiting on that Pie update, but it shouldn't be long now. LG has released the Pie-based kernel source for the V40 and LG G8.
LG's official bootloader unlock tool makes the company seem developer-friendly on the surface, but very few phone variants actually get added to it. For instance, the last supported US-market variant on the rather short list was the LG G6, a phone that was announced nearly two years ago. LG has just added the V40 to the list, but unsurprisingly, only the European-market model is compatible with the tool.
Thanks to its ARCore SDK, Google made developing augmented reality applications more accessible and streamlined. To guarantee a consistent experience across devices, the Californian giant has put a certification process in place, through which it ensures the camera, motion sensors, and CPU perform as expected. Among the list of officially supported handsets are the LG G7, V30, V35, and V40 series, which offer the same motion tracking as other certified products. Nevertheless, Google acknowledged autofocus is not correctly working on these phones for the time being, although that shouldn't alter the end user's experience.
Augmented Reality may not yet be the game-changer some of its proponents would hope it to be, but little by little it's been coming into its own. AR's been in the spotlight this month thanks to the launch of the Pixel 3 and Google's re-branding of its AR Stickers app as Playground, but that's just the half of it — we've also seen a number of new devices join the list of official AR Core-supporting hardware.
In spite of having less name recognition than competitors like Google, Samsung, and Apple, LG is bold enough to ask $949.99 for its V40 ThinQ. The V40 is the best phone LG's ever made, but as we said in our review, that's not quite enough. Luckily, B&H is slashing $200 off, bringing the price down to a much more palatable 9.99, and it's also throwing in a free 256GB SanDisk microSD card and a second year of warranty.
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- Just a little over a week from the V40's debut, your chance has finally arrived to get a pre-order in for LG's latest flagship. As we noted when initially sharing these pre-order dates with you, Verizon couldn't control its enthusiasm and got things started a day early, accepting pre-orders beginning yesterday.
LG has just taken the wraps off the V40 ThinQ, its follow-up to the almost continual V30/V30S ThinQ/V35 ThinQ refreshes. The latest iteration in the V series brings real change in design, though, with a new notched and significantly improved OLED display, triple rear camera configuration, and a $900-1000 price tag to go with it.
It's not unusual for kernel source codes to be published before phones/updates even debut, but just two days after LG took the wraps off of the V40, the kernel source code for various models has already been published.
The LG V40 is officially official, and you can get all the specifications you can handle in the handy table below. But we already knew most of that going in, and of what we didn't know, most of that was predictable: the latest and greatest Qualcomm processor, a big, vibrant OLED display, and a whole mess of cameras. Stare at the list of features and value-adds all you want, but it's not going to answer a critical question: has LG built a big phone worthy of taking on Samsung's $1000 behemoth?
In a curious move, possibly to put an end to any further leaks, LG has released a video and blog post detailing the design of the LG V40 ThinQ. It's due to be announced in full on October 3, but now we have official confirmation of the design (at least from the rear) and some of the specs.
LG's phone release cycle has been a bit weird in 2018. It re-released the V30 a few times, and the G7 ThinQ popped up in several variants. Now, it's time for the long-rumored V40 ThinQ to make its premiere. LG has sent out invites to an event on October 3rd with the phrase "Take 5." That would seem to confirm a five-camera phone.
Every week, I examine somewhere in the neighborhood of a hundred app updates while looking for changes. The most interesting things turn into APK Teardowns or Download posts. Many of the remaining updates are unremarkable, amounting to a few bug fixes, routine updates to libraries, or even just pixel-level adjustments to layouts and images. However, there are usually a few updates that land somewhere in between. I don't want to spam readers with dozens of short posts, but I hate to ignore things that people might want to know about, so I'm going to wrap up the leftovers for a little weekend reading and call it Update Notes.
Speaking to a source familiar with the company's plans, we've learned that LG is working on a successor to its V30 handset, tentatively known as the V40 - and it will feature five cameras. It's not clear exactly what all of them will do, but at least one of the two on the front (and possibly both) will allow you to unlock the phone with your face. Based on the setup process described to us, it seems this could be a stereo configuration allowing a 3D map of the face to be recorded - but we're not certain.