Alongside its first-ever 5G smartphone, the V50, LG has also launched its flagship LG G8 ThinQ at MWC 2019 in Barcelona. It doesn’t bring any significant design changes, but has further enhanced the camera and audio experience while also introducing a new way to interact and unlock your smartphone.

Z Camera and Hand ID

LG has integrated something they’re calling a TOF Z camera and infrared sensors in the notch on the front of the G8 ThinQ. The Z camera is pretty capable as it can identify the owner by recognizing the shape, thickness, and other individual characteristics of veins inside the palms of their hands.

The Z camera, LG touts also comes in helpful in improving portrait selfies (using the 8MP camera) as the infrared rays reflect off subjects resulting in lot more accurate and faster depth calculation. This surely becomes useful in improving the security of Face Unlock as well.

Air Motion

Baking a TOF Z camera into the LG G8 ThinQ also provides users a new way to interact with the smartphone, i.e by waving your hand in front of the screen. This is dubbed Air Motion and enables you to control the volume, answer calls, take screenshots or switch between apps without having to touch the screen. You can now simply do a waving or pinching gestures in the air in front of LG G8 ThinQ to complete tasks. Handy or gimmick?

LG G8 ThinQ Specs

As for the rest of the specifications, the LG ThinQ sports a 6.1-inch Quad-HD+ FullVision Display with 564 pixels per inch density, which sound quite amazing. It’s powered by the new Qualcomm Snapdragon 855 chipset, coupled with 6GB RAM and 128GB of onboard storage. It runs Android 9 Pie out of the box, retains the headphone jack with the high-fidelity 32-bit Hi-Fi Quad DAC built-in, and a USB Type-C charging port.

In the camera department, the LG G8 ThinQ comes with a triple rear-camera array. The smartphone includes a 12MP (f/1.5) primary sensor, 16MP (f/1.9) super-wide angle lens, and another 12MP telephoto lens to help you get close to subjects. LG has also added a real-time video portrait mode to the device as well.

LG G8s ThinQ

The Korean giant has also launched a slightly lower-specced version of their flagship as well, designed especially for developing markets. LG G8s ThinQ brings to the table all of these unique features we’ve talked about above, but with a compromise on raw specs.