LG V40 ThinQ vs Galaxy Note 9: nothing is closer

Design

The V40 and Note 9 are glossy glass and metal plates, as most smartphones are in 2018. Note 9 is particularly large, despite the same 6.4-inch screen as the V40. Samsung's giant flagship measures 6.3 inches long compared to the 2.98-inch body of the V40. A hair wider than the 2.98-inch frame of the V40 exceeds 3 inches.

The rectangular shape of Note 9 has more square corners than the V40, which is rounded on all sides, like an iPhone XS.

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At the back, both phones seem to have the same set of horizontal cameras at first glance. Looking closer, the V40 board has three lenses (telephoto, standard and wide-angle), compared to the dual-lens configuration with a flash on Note 9. Both cameras have fingerprint sensors that more than frontal facial recognition.

You will have more choice of shades with the Note 9, which comes in four shades: lavender, blue, silver and black. The Ocean Blue shade also comes with a bright yellow stylus, which is a quirky design that is lacking in the V40. LG's flagship product is security: the device is available in black and blue.

Note 9 is generally heavier and larger than the V40, but also gives you more colors. This one is a tie.

Winner: Draw

Display

LG's widescreen 6.4-inch quad-HD display is a winner, with a 3120 x 1440 OLED display with higher resolution than the 2950 x 1440 Super AMOLED display of similar size.

The screen of Note 9 is brighter, more colorful and more true to reality than the panel of the V40. In our laboratory tests, Samsung's flagship product recorded 604 nits on the light meter, compared to 571 on the V40. The screen of Note 9 covers 224% of the sRGB color gamut, easily exceeding the 160.4% covered by the V40. On the Delta-E color accuracy test, the V40 scored 0.45, making it slightly less accurate than the score of 0.34 in Note 9. (The numbers closer to 0 are better.)

On a daily basis, I prefer the Infinity display of Note 9, because the curved glass makes each video and each game more immersive. The images virtually disappear from the screen.

Winner: Note 9

Performance

The V40 ThinQ and Galaxy Note 9 processors both use Qualcomm's latest Snapdragon 845 processor and 6GB of RAM, making it one of the most powerful Android products on the market. (The OnePlus 6 and its 8GB of RAM still reign supreme.)

The score 9 scored 8,876 on the Geekbench 4 overall system performance test, compared to the 8,302 score of the V40.

In terms of graphics performance, Note 9 easily outperforms the V40 of the 3DMark Slingshot Extreme 3.1 benchmark with a score of 4,639 compared to 3,461.

Both phones are very powerful, but Note 9 has the edge.

Winner: Note 9

Cameras

The point of sale of the V40 is his or her cameras. Five of them, to be exact. The latest LG model includes three rear-facing lenses, a telephoto lens, a standard lens and a wide-angle lens, and two front-facing lenses (standard and wide-angle). Note 9 has only three lenses: two at the back and one at the front.

And yet, the photos in Note 9 have always been better than those of the V40 when I tested them. The V40's Triple Shot feature, which captures an image of each lens simultaneously and records them separately, is a complete shot. You need to point the camera at what you want to shoot and hope that each lens has a good angle, because you can not preview in Triple Shot mode. Most of the photos I took using this feature were peculiar.

Click on the image above to expandI compared the telephoto lens of the V40 with a 2x optical zoom to that of the Note 9 and I found that the V40 lens did not capture the details in the same way as that of the Note 9. In this photo of Charro, a green iguana at the Houston Butterfly Conservatory, the optical zoom of note 9 captures the details of the orange scales of the reptile, while the telephoto lens of the V40 overexposes them.

Portrait mode was even worse. The V40 was struggling to hang on to an object, such as a butterfly perched on a flower, and to focus it. Note 9 did not have any problems to create a beautiful portrait of the butterfly.

Portrait selfies were also mediocre on the V40. In this outdoor shot, the V40 swept the background so you can not see the skyscrapers in the distance. The colors in Note 9 were more accurate.

Winner: Note 9

Special features

The unique features of the V40 are designed to take advantage of the five cameras on the phone. As mentioned above, I did not like the Triple Shot feature, but the V40 also lets you take cinematic pictures that move very slightly. This tool, called Cine Shot, uses one of three back objectives to record a 3-minute clip that you can then animate by highlighting the area you want to move.

The special features of Galaxy Note 9 are focused on productivity. The S Pen Pen can be used to take notes on the screen or as a Bluetooth remote control for the phone. With an adapter and an HDMI cable, you can project the note screen to an external monitor and use the phone's display as a touchpad.

The unique photography features of the V40 simply do not work very well. The Productivity Tools in Note 9 make it a nearly perfect smartphone for frequent users. The winner is obvious.

Winner: Note 9

Battery life

Here, no dispute: the battery 4 000 mAh Note 9 easily beats the pack 3 300 mAh V40. Note 9 lasted 11 hours and 26 minutes on the Tom's Guide battery test, a continuous web surfing on T-Mobile's LTE network, compared to a performance below the 8:48 V40 average. It's a difference of almost two and a half hours, which is a huge problem for the more experienced users who are constantly using their phones.

Winner: Note 9

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Price and value

The V40 ThinQ and Note 9 are expensive phones. Note 9 starts at $ 999 for a 128GB model with 6GB of RAM. You can spoil yourself with the more expensive version of $ 1,249, which offers 512 GB of storage and 8 GB of RAM.

The V40 is offered in one version, with 64GB of storage and 6GB of RAM, starting at $ 900 (up to $ 980 depending on the carrier).

It seems that the V40 wins this price because of its lower price, but Note 9 offers much more for only $ 100 of premium, including more storage, more productivity features, better cameras. If anything, the V40 should be a lot cheaper.

Winner: Note 9

Winner

The V40 ThinQ gets married to Galaxy Note 9 on paper, but in the real world, Note 9 easily beats LG's latest flagship product.