LG will not be releasing a new successor to the G6 this year at Mobile World Congress. In 2016, the company used this show to debut its radical LG G5 modular flagship. In 2017, we saw the LG G6, which was among the first phones with an almost bezel-free display. This year they are giving us a rehash: the LG V30S ThinQ. (a mouthful of a name)
The V30S retains the exact same design as the V30, the same dual-camera system, the same 18:9 display, same 3,300mAh battery, and same Snapdragon 835 processor. (At least they would have gone with the latest 845) The only upgrades are to memory, with the V30S stepping up from 4GB of RAM to 6GB, and from a choice between 64GB or 128GB of storage to a 128GB or 256GB selection. The colors on offer are called New Platinum Grey and New Moroccan Blue, in case they’re accidentally confused for being unchanged like the rest of the phone.
AI Cam galore
So why does this V30S really exist? LG gave a media presentation at MWC where it explained its thinking about AI integration into mobile devices and how that found expression in the company’s new AI Cam, the V30S’ headline novelty. But here’s the issue: the AI Cam and every other software improvement in the V30S are promised to be delivered as an update to V30 phones.
The AI Cam facility is licensed by LG from EyeEm — a tool called EyeEm Vision, which other phone makers are free to license too — and I’m told its machine-learning system has been trained on 100 million images.
Finally, LG’s made with the V30S camera is a new Bright Mode, which combines four pixels into one to produce brighter pictures in extreme low light. The trade-off there is you lose resolution for improved exposure. This is another change that’s also coming to the existing V30.
