LG Announces VELVET Phone: Korea Only For Now

LG had been teasing the “Velvet” for several weeks now, trickle-feeding information about the company’s new premium level smartphone. Today, the company officially launches the device in Korea, fully revealing the specifications of the device as well as its pricing.

The LG Velvet isn’t a “true flagship” as it positions itself just one tier below that, featuring a Snapdragon 765 SoC as well as a lesser camera configuration. Where it does stand out is in the design – whilst some might criticise as “standard”, it’s probably LG’s best-looking phone in years. All whilst maintaining a reasonable price tag of around 670 USD.

Internally, the phone is powered by the Snapdragon 765 SoC, which is Qualcomm’s second-highest tier chip this year. Supporting two Cortex-A76 cores, one at 2.3GHz and one at 2.2GHz alongside 6 Cortex-A55 cores at 1.8GHz, it should perform adequately, although it’s still quite behind the flagship Snapdragon 865 phones out there.

LG configures the Velvet with 8GB of DRAM as well as 128GB of UFS 2.1 as base storage configurations, and there’s a microSD slot for expansions.

Dimension-wise, although it shares the same screen diagonal as the LG V60 at 6.8”, the Velvet is a quite smaller phone as the screen curves to the sides and has very narrow side-bezels, resulting in a 74.1mm body width – around the same form-factor as an S20+.

It’s an POLED display with 2460 x 1080 resolution in a 20.5:9 aspect ratio, LG here is lacking any special features such as high refresh rates.

As teased several weeks ago, it’s a quite differently looking LG device as it sports a new industrial design that leaves behind some of LG’s more “practical” approaches of previous generations. Yes it’s still very much a glass sandwich and certainly not anything revolutionary, but I still think it looks quite good in terms of its execution.

The Velvet maintains a reasonable weight and thickness at 180g and 7.9mm – still able to host a 4300mAh battery in its body.

The camera setup was the one big unanswered question in terms of specifications of the phone, but today’s announcement seems quite disappointing in this regard. The phone has a 48MP main camera alongside a measly 8MP ultra-wide-angle and a 5MP depth sensor module. This really is quite below the industry standard at this device level – I just hope that the 48MP module is a decent one as I don’t have much expectations of that UWA.

Other selling-points of the Velvet is the fact that it still features a 3.5mm headphone jack which nowadays is a rarity in new phones.

LG announced the Velvet only in Korea for now at a price of ₩899,800 which corresponds to $670 pre-taxes. It’s an attractive phone, but I feel like it will be a make-or-break matter in regards to its camera abilities. The fact that LG is only releasing the device in Korea at this moment in time suggest that they’re experimenting and waiting out to gauge the reactions before possibly considering a wider device launch. I certainly commend them on the new industrial design of the phone – the company’s certainly on the right path in that regard.

Related Reading:

• LG Teases "Velvet" Phone with Snapdragon 765
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• The LG G8 Review: Solid, But Not Great