LG V40 ThinQ review: 6.4" QuadHD display, 6GB of RAM, Snapdragon 845, available for preorder now for $900+; five camera system is versatile but not high-quality
Dan Seifert / The Verge : Tweets: @greengart Tweets: Avi Greengart / @greengart : If you push the top right button, the LG Watch W7 mechanical hands move out of the way so you can read your notifications. It sort of works. http://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
LG's V-series has been its credibility line since the V30 landed as a polished, focused flagship in 2017 — reviewers praised exactly the restraint the new phone abandons. The V40 ThinQ now ships with five cameras at $900+ preorder pricing, and The Verge's verdict is that the added hardware buys versatility, not quality.
That trade-off echoes an older LG pattern: the V10's gimmicky second screen drew the same critique of feature-stacking over execution. Meanwhile Huawei's P30 Pro pairs four cameras with up to 10x lossless zoom at €999, setting the bar the V40's five lenses fail to clear.
First-order effects
- Buyers preordering the V40 at $900+ get Snapdragon 845 performance and a 6.4-inch QuadHD display, but pay flagship prices for a camera system The Verge rates versatile rather than high-quality — weakening LG's main selling point at the moment of purchase.
Second-order effects
- Rivals can undercut the spec-count pitch directly: Huawei's P30 Pro shows that fewer, better cameras with real zoom capability beat LG's five-lens array on both reviews and price positioning, forcing LG to compete on image processing rather than lens inventory.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the multi-camera arms race gives way to per-camera quality and computational photography as the premium differentiator, leaving camera-count leaders like LG structurally behind even as they add hardware.
The trend: Premium smartphones are shifting from competing on camera count to competing on per-camera image quality, and LG's five-lens V40 shows the limits of the old playbook.