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Battery life
- 3,300mAh battery delivers average life
- Battery smarts keep it healthy for longer
The improvement of the battery from 2,800mAh to 3,300mAh should bring cheers from anyone who wants a phone with a long battery life – LG has historically been excellent at optimizing battery, so packing in more power is always going to be a welcome move.
This is where the inclusion of the Snapdragon 821 processor is going to have an effect too, according to LG, as its engineers have worked with the chipset for longer and have managed to extract more performance out of it, which leads to longer-lasting and less hot handsets.
Whether this is just an excuse remains to be seen – there are many efficiency advantages being touted by Qualcomm in its latest 835 chip – and LG could be just trying to deflect from the decision to use an older (and presumably cheaper) engine in its phone.
In terms of day to day use, the LG G6 is just, well, fine when it comes to battery performance. It's as good as most on the market, better than the iPhone 7 and about the equivalent of the Samsung Galaxy S8.
In our battery testing, we ran a 90 minute Full HD video with the brightness cranked up to the maximum, and the phone dropped 14% of its power in that time, which isn't the best we've seen, but it's better than average.
The iPhone 7 for comparison dropped 23% in this test, while the Lenovo P2 - which has a big 5,100mAh battery - dropped just 8%.
In real terms, that means you'll get to the end of the day with a little sweat on sometimes, as the power bar can be a little lower than we'd like come 5PM.
The LG G6 rarely ran out of battery, and when it was ensconced in a pocket the power drain was relatively minimal, but overall when in use the drop in battery life for the day was a little more than we'd have liked.
The ways you'll charge your new phone are varied, and a little hard to explain as there will be so many versions of the LG G6 throughout the world. In the US you'll be able to charge this phone wirelessly, with both PMA and WPC standards supported.
Simply put: if there's a wireless charging station around and you live in the United States, you'll be able to charge the G6 on it.
However, the rest of the world isn't getting such an option, in favor of QuickCharge 3.0 to help you juice your phone a little quicker.
(Also, South Korea is getting a Quad DAC amplifier inside, where the rest of the world is not – LG says it's trying to localize the phone more efficiently, but it seems like a lot of hassle).
There aren't many other new battery optimizations from LG here, but then again it probably didn't need them – with the more powerful and longer-lasting power pack on show users should be able to eke out longer between charges than ever before.
LG has put some smarts into the charging though, with the phone able to read the age and temperature of the battery to make sure the right amount of current goes into the power pack.
This means degradation will be slower and your G6 will last for longer. That's a Good Thing.
