The LG V60 and VELVET Review: A Classic & A Design Restart
by Andrei Frumusanu on July 15, 2020 9:00 AM ESTBattery Life - Outstanding
Battery life has been an aspect where LG has had tons of issue in past generation devices. The root cause here was the company’s usage of LG Display manufactured displays, which all shared the same common issue of having extraordinarily bad base power consumption. This had always handicapped phones from achieving better results, more accurately tracking the SoC’s efficiency and the battery capacity.
The V60’s downgrade from 1440p to 1080p screen might help in that regard, and the manufacturer also opted to include a large 5000mAh battery. The Velvet’s 4300mAh battery should also fare adequately – here’s more of a question on whether the Snapdragon 765 is as efficient as its bigger brother.
In our web-browsing test, we see the LG V60 do outstandingly good, coming in at 14.75H runtime. This vastly exceeds the results of any LG phone we’ve come to test in the past, and competes amongst the longest lasting devices in the market right now. LG still seems to have not quite as an efficient display panel as Samsung, as the S20 Ultra’s 1440p unit is only margins behind the V60, but the gap has considerably narrowed.
The LG Velvet surprised us with equally impressive results. At 12.73 hours runtime, it’s also a great result given the phone’s battery capacity, and nearly scales in line with the 700mAh difference to the V60. This bodes well for the Snapdragon 765 overall, although we’ve seen that the CPU cores themselves aren’t as efficient as on the Snapdragon 865.
In PCMark, the V60 even manages to get the top spot in our charts by a few minutes against the 6000mAh ROG Phone II, and the Velvet also fares extremely well against the competition.
Overall, battery life of both the V60 and Velvet is outstandingly good. In a year where most other competitors have opted for higher refresh-rate displays, LG’s decision to keep things simple is rewarded by being able to take advantage of the new silicon’s power efficiency in order to notably increase battery life.
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kpb321 - Wednesday, July 15, 2020 - link
Why does it matter? Does anyone really regularly do anything with the USB port other than charge the device? Android doesn't have a local back up to a computer like iPhone/iTunes and even on that side it seems like most things happen automatically over wireless/wifi connection anyway. I doubt my wife could name the last time she hooker her android phone up to her computer. With her current phone I'm not even sure if she ever has hooked it up to a computer. For my iPhone I don't think I've ever hooked my current one up to my computer. Last time I upgraded I just used the wizard and it copied over what it needed to for the profile and then automatically reinstalled all the apps.flyingpants265 - Wednesday, July 15, 2020 - link
"Enthusiasts" will hate me, but the headphone jack should be kept, and the USB-C port should be completely eliminated. You can charge with any port.flyingpants265 - Wednesday, July 15, 2020 - link
USB-C is like an incremental upgrade to USB micro.if I'm actually designing something for scratch that would be perfect for phones, I'd have some kind of waterproof magnetic connector that doesn't have a million pins and giant connectors.
TheinsanegamerN - Thursday, July 16, 2020 - link
Magnetic would be an interesting addition, but USB also serves as the manner to bootstrap the device once its built and load the OS. So your magnetic connector would also need to do data.s.yu - Thursday, July 16, 2020 - link
Yes magnetics do data, the majority do.TheinsanegamerN - Thursday, July 16, 2020 - link
LOLWAT. How is that any better? The big issue with removing the headphone jack is that there is only 1 port, and you cant charge and listen to audio at the same time. Going to just a headphone jack wouldnt make it any better, and no you cannot just charge with "any port", the headphone jack was not designed to charge a phone, let alone charge while also streaming audio.flyingpants265 - Sunday, July 19, 2020 - link
So, you didn't actually read my comments?psychobriggsy - Wednesday, July 15, 2020 - link
What would be useful in a mobile phone review is additionally comparing to an older phone of a similar price (at the time) that someone would be upgrading from, hence their interest in looking at a review of a phone. How much faster is the device - is it even worth upgrading if the phone is otherwise okay?s.yu - Wednesday, July 15, 2020 - link
Sounds good except you'd need to compare multiple phones from multiple years, there's no telling if one upgrades annually, biennially, triennially, or...it goes on and on. With Anandtech's interface it's not realistic, but with Notebookcheck's at least you can manually add devices to a comparison list, though that would be once every section, e.g. if you added a device in the CPU section you'd need to add it again for a GPU or battery life comparison. Also older devices may not have been tested by the exact same testing methods, e.g. GB4 is obviously not comparable with GB5, crucially, battery tests are also updated.flyingpants265 - Wednesday, July 15, 2020 - link
What on earth are you even saying?