In a world where most smartphones are largely similar, the LG G6 immediately stands out from the crowd, if only because of its distinctive shape. In a market that has largely adopted the 16: 9 widescreen formats, the larger, narrower 18: 9 aspect ratio is a bold departure - but it makes a lot of sense. They have the luxurious feel of a large screen that measures a generous 5.7 inches across the diagonal without the awkward width that makes large-size phones clumsy in the hand.

The G6 costs around £ 650 SIM-free, from both online and wholesalers, you can also contract it from £ 43.99. There are three color variants with the traditional, airy names offered: You can choose between "Astro Black", "Mystic White" or the "Ice Platinum" model that we have tried. All models have an internal memory of 32 GB. If you need more, the side slot will accept two additional SIM cards or a micro SD card, allowing you to add up to 2TB of additional storage. For what you get, this is a top prize, but not with today's flagship phones. The iPhone 7 is cheaper at £ 579, but you pay £ 689 for a Samsung Galaxy S8.

LG G6 - Design and Build Quality:

The LG G6 looks and feels like a high-end handset, thanks to its stylish metal frame and glass back. The latter uses Corning's Gorilla Glass 5 for a good degree of shatter proofing and scratch resistance (although it does have a tendency to pick up fingerprints). The 5.7in front screen uses Gorilla Glass 3, so it is accidentally drop the phone on its side; the impact is not directly conveyed to the screen. So the G6 wants to survive on accidental drop into water: it's IP68-rated, which means you could in theory submerge it at a depth of 1.5m for 30 minutes. Controls and connections are minimal. As with previous LG phones, the power button is located on the back of the phone, beneath the camera.

LG G6 - Display:

The main attraction of LG G6 is its unusually shaped display. Pictures do not do justice to what ergonomic step forward this is. It's comfortable to use one-handed while listening to expanded viewport that's great for browsing the web and playing games. But it's not the dimensions that are interesting about this display. The IPS panel features HDR 10 support, allowing you to enjoy HDR videos from Amazon Prime and Netflix with stunning visual dynamics - or at least, it will roll out soon.

Also for daily use, it is a great ad. We measured a maximum brightness of 492 cd / m2, delivering fantastically deep blacks at just 0.23 cd / m2. This corresponds to a contrast ratio of 2,139: 1 - with the best IPS telephone screens. The only slight disappointment is the color reproduction. The screen of the G6 covers 93.2% of the sRGB scale. This is certainly not a bad score, but we have seen that smartphones with AMOLED displays perform even better.

LG G6 - Software and Performance:

Android 7 is running on the LG G6, although you may not recognize it because it's overlaid with LG's UX 6 frontend. The most interesting feature is the ability to divide the multitasking screen into two squares. This works well: for example, you can read about a restaurant in Chrome while looking for directions in Google Maps. Or you can keep your picture gallery open while you take new photos.

Although we had no problems running two apps at the same time, the internals of the LG G6 are not particularly impressive. It uses the same quad-core Snapdragon ARM 821 processor found on the Google Pixel and Pixel XL models. Clocked at 2.35GHz and supported by 4GB of RAM, it's just a small step away from the Snapdragon 820 on the G5. The gaming performance is similar, as measured by the GFXBench Manhattan test. The G6 actually has decent graphics performance as its offscore results indicate. However, the frame rates you actually experience are one step behind LG's competitors, no doubt thanks to the demands made on the large, unusually shaped screen. Even the older G5 was a bit softer.