LG V50 ThinQ 5G Dual Screen review

High-res display, large notch

The LG V50 ThinQ 5G packs a large 6.4" P-OLED screen of 1,440 x 3,120 px resolution that's making for an amazing 538pp density. There is a large cutout at the top for the selfie cameras and the earpiece.

A Gorilla Glass 5 piece shields the screen against damage, but if you want - you can apply whatever screen protector as there is no under-display fingerprint scanner.

The panel is one of the most premium you can get today in a smartphone - in addition to the high resolution, the screen also supports both HDR10 and Dolby Vision standards, and always-on is an option if you want the time to be always at a glance.

We measured maximum brightness of 390 nits in manual mode and up to 533 nits when Auto Brightness is used. There is minor light bleed when the screen is showing pitch black, which while rare, it is not unheard of.

The screen can go as dark as just 2.3 nits when displaying 100% white.

The screen on the Dual Screen case can either match the main screen brightness or be configured via its proprietary brightness scrubber. Its maximum output is 386 nits.

In Display Settings there is a dedicated Color section, where you can choose between Auto, Cinema, Sports, Game, Photos, Web, or Expert (manual tuning RGB and color temp tuning). In Auto we measured a very good accuracy towards the DCI-P3 color space with an average deltaE of 4.7. The white and gray hues have a noticeable blue tinge here, which can be fixed by opting for Cinema - the average deltaE drops down to 3.8 and the white color becomes perfect.

Battery life

The LG V50 is powered by a 4,000 mAh battery - a 20% increase over V40's 3,300 mAh cell. The phone supports Quick Charge 3.0 though its bundled charger is rated 5V/1.8A (9W) and 9V/1.8V (16.2W) - meaning there are faster compatible chargers you can buy, say rated 18W.

Anyway, with the supplied adapter you can replenish 31% of V50's depleted battery in 30 mins.

We completed our battery test, and the LG V50 excelled in everything. It did great on the onscreen tests clocking over 11 hours of web browsing and nearly 15 hours of looped video playback. Adding the excellent 3G calls time and the frugal standby power draw, the V50 scored an overall endurance rating of 96 hours.

Our battery tests were automated thanks to SmartViser, using its viSerDevice app. The endurance rating above denotes how long a single battery charge will last you if you use the LG V50 ThinQ for an hour each of telephony, web browsing, and video playback daily. We've established this usage pattern so that our battery results are comparable across devices in the most common day-to-day tasks. The battery testing procedure is described in detail in case you're interested in the nitty-gritty. You can check out our complete battery test table, where you can see how all of the smartphones we've tested will compare under your own typical use.

LG's assessment that the DualScreen adds 20% to 30% to the battery draw and, assuming you won't be using it all of the time, the 4,000mAh battery should be enough for when you do want to use it.

Speaker test (old, new one below)

The LG V50 ThinQ has stereo speakers, which is something you won't find on the G phones. There is a proper speaker at the bottom, while the earpiece doubles as a second loudspeaker and thus the stereo effect is achieved.

The LG V50 scored a Very Good mark in our loudness test and the output sounds mostly even, though the earpiece is not as loud as the main tweeter. The sound is quite shallow though as it is lacking in mid-tones big time.

Speaker test (new)

Use the Playback controls to listen to the phone sample recordings (best use headphones). We measure the average loudness of the speakers in LUFS. A lower absolute value means a louder sound. A look at the frequency response chart will tell you how far off the ideal "0db" flat line is the reproduction of the bass, treble, and mid frequencies. You can add more phones to compare how they differ. The scores and ratings are not comparable with our older loudspeaker test. Learn more about how we test here.

Audio quality

When going through its dedicated audio jack the LG V50 ThinQ delivered perfect sound output in both parts of our audio quality test. All of its scores were top-notch with an active amplifier and headphones caused basically no damage - we’ve seen higher stereo crosstalk readings from other phones without headphones than the V50 5G managed with.

The loudness of the LG V50 was just above average in both cases. This certainly won't be winning it any bonus points, but it won't be held against it either.

LG V50 ThinQ 5G frequency response

You can learn more about the tested parameters and the whole testing process here.