LG V30 ThinQ long-term review

Frustrations, niggles, annoyances

Of course, as with any product, there are still some kinks, which make us scratch our heads in bewilderment or simply annoy us. There are no major dealbreakers with the V30S but we have a few pet peeves with some aspects of how this smartphone works or rather, with how it doesn't work as expected at times.

While the auto-brightness works well in most cases, we found a weird issue with it, namely that it would never, under any circumstances, go under 15%. You can be in a pitch black environment and it's still going to be at 15%, which isn't all that great for your eyes.

Of course, you can manually adjust the slider to a lower setting, even all the way down to 0, but you will need to do this every single time if you use the phone in darkness. It's obviously nothing more than a software problem which would be easy to fix through a software update, but at the moment it hasn't been addressed.

Auto-brightness won't go lower

The proximity sensor seems to have a very small radius of operation too. It will turn the screen off if you're holding the phone to your ear normally while in a call, but the second you try to go 'hands-free' and simply balance the V30S between your face and your shoulder things go wrong. The sensor isn't doing its thing anymore, and thus the screen will turn back on. Since at least a part of your face is touching the handset, you will almost always 'tap' things you didn't mean to - and the big buttons in the call screen don't help in this regard.

We can't count how many times we've inadvertently put a call on hold or on speaker in such circumstances. This might be a result of how small the top bezel is, as that's where this sensor is housed. We only mention this because it's the first time we've ever encountered such problems, on other devices the proximity sensor simply keeps the display off even if you aren't holding the device at a perfect angle to your ear.

The touchscreen feels a bit too sensitive, at times mistaking a scrolling action for a tap - this can result in an unintended Like on Facebook, or a picture going full screen when all you wanted was to scroll past it. It doesn't happen all the time, but we have encountered such behavior at least a couple of times a day.

The V30S comes with support for Wi-Fi 802.11ac, which is great, but speed tests never went above 120Mbps for downloads in our experience, while being in the same room with the router. That's even though other phones with a 1x1 antenna setup always go past 300Mbps in exactly the same place. This odd limitation doesn't apply to upload speeds, though.

Representative speed test on Wi-Fi 802.11ac

We can't definitively say whether this is a hardware problem or a software one, and downloads even around 120Mbps will certainly be fine for most people. There's also a chance that the issue arises from some weird incompatibility between the V30S' Wi-Fi stack and the Asus router we've used for testing, so we aren't going to say you will always be confronted with this limitation, but it's something to keep in mind nevertheless.

As with most recent flagship smartphones running Android, Bluetooth auto-reconnecting (to previously paired devices) is a bit hit and miss. With certain accessories you'll find that the V30S reconnects without a hitch, but then sometimes it won't - which means you'll have to go into the Bluetooth menu on the phone and manually select whatever it is you want to connect to.

Powering off the accessory and then on again after a failed reconnect will yield a positive outcome in about 90% of cases, but for some reason this doesn't always work. Such problems seem especially prevalent on handsets with Qualcomm chipsets, from what we've gathered so far.

Speaking of Bluetooth, the V30S has a neat setting that promises to start up a specific app every time you have connected to a Bluetooth device, and you can set a different app for each accessory. That's great in theory but in practice we found that it only worked as advertised for one of our Bluetooth speakers.

Bluetooth smart setting

There's a Screen sharing option that you can access from the Quick Settings menu, and it's supposed to work via Miracast and Chromecast. Yet while it's reliable in connecting to TVs supporting Miracast, Chromecast is a different story. Quite a few times it didn't find any available devices to cast to, even if a Chromecast was active on the same Wi-Fi network and could be accessed from other smartphones without a problem.

Finally, here's a very specific software issue that we hope you won't encounter. In order for your Garmin smartwatch of fitness band to show you notifications on your wrist, you need to grant the Garmin app on your smartphone 'special access'. On every other handset, this is done once after you've installed it, as the setting sticks. Not so on the V30S, unfortunately. This Notification access setting constantly turns itself off, and we found we needed to go into Settings and toggle it back on at least a couple of times each day. Once again this is something that would easily be fixed in a software update, so we're keeping our fingers crossed.

Notification access setting which turns itself off randomly