LG announced the G8X ThinQ as a sort of almost folding phone competitor. By itself, the G8X is really just a more powerful LG G8 ThinQ with some slight improvements, but it comes with that nifty dual-screen accessory that gives you an entire extra screen to multitask and play with.

Okay, so on paper, that's a little weird, and it probably won't take the wind out of the Galaxy Fold's sales. But is it worth it on its own merits? Let's find out.

Design

The design of the G8X is pretty similar to the G8, albeit slightly larger. The notch is smaller, with LG going for a teardrop notch instead of the wider cutout, and they moved the SIM/SD card tray to the top instead of on the right side. That smaller notch also means that the air gesture things from the G8 are absent, but… I don't know that you'll miss them.

Otherwise, you're still getting a USB-C port at the bottom offset by speakers and a headphone jack, the Google Assistant button on the left below two volume buttons, a power button on the right, and the same slick glass design. It feels a little more weighty than the G8, but that's probably just from size.

The back houses two cameras and an LED flash, but there's no fingerprint scanner here anymore. LG finally put that underneath the screen, catching up to some of its closest competitors.

It's a 6.4-inch display, so it's more in line with the LG V50 than the G8 as far as holding it goes. It's a little large for me, and I do prefer the smaller form factor of the G8 more, but there's no doubt that this is an excellent choice for movies, especially with what the second screen adds.

Oh, and let's talk about that Dual Screen attachment.

It legitimately feels like the biggest wallet folio case you can imagine, and that's probably true because it has an entire second duplicate screen built right in. The phone slides down into the case and connects to a USB-C connector at the bottom, which enables all of the data sharing. Once it's in, though, it's bulky.

There's a good weight to the Dual Screen, and it feels like it can take a few drops and spills (although with so many screens on it I really would hate to test that) but it changes how you would typically use a phone. Even for someone that's used to testing out larger phones, the G8X with the Dual Screen folded back is almost unusable with a single hand just because of the extra depth it adds. It also has a strange magnetic connector on the bottom instead of another USB-C port, so you'll have to put an adapter on your regular USB-C charging cable. I don't love that at all.

Hardware

Performance

LG hasn't drastically changed the internals of the G8X, so we're looking at another Snapdragon 855 device paired with 6GB of RAM. Like the LG G8, that's plenty of horsepower for just about everything you can throw at it, and that does extend to utilizing the second display. When using the Dual Screen accessory you get two screens that can act totally independently. You can scroll up on YouTube while going down your email inbox, for example, and I (maybe surprisingly?) never encountered any lag or hitching while doing this. Even having a game on one screen while browsing Reddit on the other was fine.

The speakers are the same BoomBox speakers that LG advertises on their other devices, which I think are above average but still leave a little to be desired in the low-end. The OLED display looks great despite being slightly lower resolution than what's in the V50, and the second display in the Dual Screen is calibrated to match the G8X so there's no weirdness with one screen being warmer than the other.

The in-display fingerprint scanner is a little faster than what Samsung uses in the S10/Note 10, but still slower than newer OnePlus devices. I imagine actual security sits somewhere between those two as well.

Battery

With a 4000mAh battery I was expecting some pretty decent battery life out of the G8X. I at least expected it to match if not best the regular G8. What I was not expecting was for it to be a sizable improvement, with or without the Dual Screen accessory, but that's what I got.

Using this thing for an entire day as a normal phone is easy. The battery has plenty of juice for even intensive multitasking and gaming, but I expected the Dual Screen to just murder the phone's battery since it doesn't have any charge of its own, but honestly, I didn't see a huge decrease while using the accessory. It's going to be worse, of course, but if you're worried about the Dual Screen wrecking the battery and making it a useless tool away from a charger, don't be. I still got a full day of usage with it, although I had to be a little more careful about really battery heavy tasks like GPS and gaming.

Software and the Dual Screen

The software on the G8X is more or less identical to the regular G8, so if you're interested in LG's specific flavor of Android, I'm going to recommend checking out our LG G8 ThinQ review to see how it fares. Keep in mind this phone doesn't have any of the Air Gestures this time around, though.

Instead, I'm going to talk about that Dual Screen accessory and all of the tricks and quirks that come with it.

Sliding the phone into the Dual Screen essentially gives you two extra displays. One of those displays always sits over the front of the device, and is admittedly a little less useful; it's just an Always-On Display that shows you the time and your notifications. You can't really interact or do much with it, but it will give you alerts to let you know you should unfold your phone. Not quite Galaxy Fold level here.

On the inside is where things get interesting. The accessory is really just like if you glued two phones together, but those phones could also share information and interact with each other. Since there's a pretty big bezel in the way you can't ever have one large image or video or whatever stretched across both screens, so LG is angling this as more of a secondary productivity screen instead of how Samsung and Huawei talk about their folding phones.

For example, there are tools to turn one screen into a full keyboard so you can type easier to reply to emails or in a web browser, and there's a neat little feature in LG's game mode app that turns one display into a full controller for compatible games. This can be completely customized on a per-game basis as well, and there are tons of preset options to up your gaming experience, which is really fun to tinker with.

Since both screens work individually, you can pull up two web browsers, or your password manager and Twitter, or Gmail and your calendar, or any combination you can think of. There's a floating bar to quickly swap what's on the two screens, too, and it's all very intuitive and fast. I don't normally praise LG software, but this is nice.

Some built-in apps take advantage of this as well, like the camera app. You can use one screen as a viewfinder to take tricky angles and shots, or you can have the camera on one display with your gallery on the other to immediately see your images to edit them. It seems gimmicky, but honestly, using that second screen has been fun and painless and does help move things along sometimes.

My only gripe with it is that it's just not as sleek as a folding phone, although that seems to be the point. Having an extra flexible viewfinder is cool, until you try and take a photo with a phone that's the size of a tablet and twice as thick. It can be difficult to hold and pretty unwieldy, and in some situations (especially for photography) it seemed easier to just ditch the Dual Screen for a bit. On the other end of that, having the Dual Screen basically just gives you an integrated kickstand for watching videos, which I absolutely love. It's perfect for YouTube, and a great procrastination tool when you can have Reddit on the bottom screen and a video playing on the top screen angled perfectly at you.

But carrying it around just wasn't always fun. It takes up a ton of room in my pocket, and it's just heavy. Plus you look like an idiot unfolding a phone at a party to get a picture. There are also a few things that LG could fix in software to make it even better, like allowing the default home screens to rotate to landscape. How did that slip through when this entire accessory makes you feel like you need to use your phone sideways? It's not like landscape launchers are something new and revolutionary, either.

It's neat, and weird, but also too weird, but maybe not weird enough. LG did something strange with this accessory, and I do really like it, but I think there needs to be a little more polish.

Camera

LG's camera here is servicable, and pretty competitive with other top-dollar flagship phones. It won't beat any of them, unfortunately, but it doesn't take bad photos at all. You're getting two cameras here, with a standard lens and an ultrawide angle lens. That's probably my biggest gripe, and I'd much rather have a telephoto lens than the ultrawide. Maybe that's an unpopular opinion? Who knows.

Outdoor shots are crisp with high levels of contrast, and you'll have no problem capturing a ton of detail. Images do come out slightly cold, though.

Low light shots turned out surprisingly well, too. Again, temperature was a little cool, but that's easily fixed afterward if it's something that bothers you. Contrast held up and images weren't quick to blow out. It's not Pixel quality, but you won't be embarrassed over the pictures the G8X takes in a bar.

For the price, it's very acceptable.

Worth it?

LG made something very weird in the G8X ThinQ. Well, technically, they made a weird accessory, because by itself this is just another run of the mill LG phone, and that probably adds to the weirdness.

It's not exactly a folding phone, but it does get you some of the cooler benefits without the insane price tags, and since it's an accessory, you can very quickly jump back to just a normal phone when that's all you need. The G8X ThinQ is all about options and flexibility.

And for that reason, honestly, I really like this thing. LG's asking a pretty reasonable price right now for it ($779 through AT&T, which includes the Dual Screen attachment) and it's still competitive with $1000 flagships. But unlike those flagships, the G8X ThinQ offers something that they don't. No amount of software is able to match having an entire extra screen to play games or watch movies on.

But that raises the question of if you need that second screen, and that's a much tougher question. I use it a ton, and I think this is one of the cooler Android innovations we've seen lately. It's a fold for the mainstream. But like foldable phones, I don't think that having all this extra screen space makes sense for everyone, and for some people, they're better off looking at something with slightly better cameras or software support.

But if you think you want in on the ground floor of this strange folding revolution, I like the G8X a lot, quirks and all. LG is pricing it at just $699, and AT&T is giving them away for free (including the Dual Screen) with a new line right now, and we're sure to see some great sales on it with the holidays coming up for everyone else. I don't see this making its way into everyone's pocket, but I think LG deserves some credit for actually trying something new and sticking the landing.