I still remember the first time I hit record on an LG V20 at a small venue show and realized the phone was picking up the full band — drums, distorted guitars, yelling crowd — without turning into a clipping, crunchy mess. It sounded like a handheld recorder, not a random slab of glass and aluminum. That was the moment it clicked: this thing wasn’t a spec-sheet toy, it was a purpose-built media tool.
The V20 wasn’t excellent, but it was unapologetically aimed at people who do stuff with their phones. Power users, tinkerers, vloggers, musicians.
A Tank With a Hatch: Design, Durability, and the Rare Removable Battery
LG didn’t just chase thinness; the V20 was built like a piece of gear. The frame used AL-6013 aluminum — the same family of alloy used in aircraft and automotive systems — plus siloxane-polycarbonate top and bottom for impact toughness. It hit MIL-STD-810G transit drop compliance while staying reasonably light at 174g and 7.6mm thick for a 5.7-inch device.
Most brands used “metal unibody” as an excuse to glue everything shut. LG did the opposite. The V20’s entire metal back was a single plate that popped off via a spring-loaded release button. No cheap plastic tabs, no flexy cover. Behind it: a removable 3,200mAh battery, SIM, and microSD slot. You got the solidity of a unibody shell without losing replaceability.
From a consumer perspective, that’s huge. Battery degraded after two years? Swap it. Going on a trip with no outlets? Pack a spare. This is the kind of practical design decision that extends device life and saves people money. Instead, the industry went all-in on sealed glass sandwiches.
Dual Screens Done Right, Not Just for Show
Up front, the V20 had an IPS LCD main display and a narrow always-on secondary strip. The main panel was a 5.7-inch QHD screen at 513ppi, pushing up to around 475 nits manually and a far higher ~628 nits in auto mode while keeping contrast near 1,000:1. Sunlight legibility was meaningfully better than LG’s own G5 and V10.
No fancy color modes, just decent calibration for an LCD with an average deltaE around 5.1 and a max around 9.5. Not reference-grade like an iPhone 7, but better than most LCDs at the time. There was a blue light filter and a DPI slider (“Display size”) so you could tune interface density instead of being stuck with cartoon-sized icons.
The second screen is where the V20 quietly nailed usability. It was a 2.1-inch-wide strip (160 x 1,040), always on, touch-enabled, and nearly twice as bright as the V10’s version. It showed shortcuts, notifications, and quick toggles even when the main display was off, and it adapted brightness and turned off in your pocket using the proximity sensor. That’s an always-on implementation that respects battery life instead of just burning pixels for aesthetics.
Audio Nerd Fever Dream: Quad DACs, Loud Mics, Real Controls
This is where the V20 still embarrasses modern phones. LG wired the 3.5mm jack to an ESS ES9218 “32-bit stereo quad-DAC” and backed it with sane software. The phone handled FLAC and ALAC up to 24-bit/192kHz, and the Hi-Fi DAC toggle was right in the notification shade.
When it detected low-quality headphones, it dialed back to one DAC to save power. Plug in decent cans — or the Bang & Olufsen-branded in-ears some regions got in-box — and it unleashed all four. Audio measurements showed it was among the loudest and cleanest devices hooked to an external amplifier, and it stayed impressively loud into headphones with only a mild increase in stereo crosstalk.
On the capture side, LG went just as hard. High Acoustic Overload Point microphones could record up to 132dB — louder than the already-brutal 120dB V10 managed. The HD Audio Recorder app offered Normal, Concert, and Custom modes, with manual controls for gain, low-cut filters (75/150Hz), and a limiter to prevent clipping. You could record uncompressed WAV or FLAC at 24-bit/192kHz, overdub vocals over a backing track, and monitor through headphones.
For people actually making music, shooting shows, or vlogging on location, that’s not a gimmick. That’s gear replacement.
Cameras: Wide, Wider, and Serious Manual Tools
The rear setup was simple by today’s standards but very focused. A 16MP main camera with a 75° field of view, f/1.8 lens, OIS, Laser + Phase Detection AF, and a color spectrum sensor. Next to it, an 8MP ultra-wide with a 135° FoV and f/2.4 lens, fixed focus.
The 16MP camera delivered high resolved detail with mostly luminance noise and punchy, consumer-friendly colors. Dynamic range wasn’t class-leading, and highlights tended to blow in harsh scenes, but overall it held its own against the 2016 flagship crowd. Panoramas, especially in portrait orientation, were excellent and stitched well.
The wide camera was unapologetically about perspective, not perfection. Lower resolution, narrower dynamic range, and amped-up color made for distorted but fun, almost “cartoonish” images that captured way more of the scene than single-camera rivals. For travel, events, or tight indoor spaces, it was a killer option.
On the front, LG pulled a neat trick: a single 5MP sensor offering both an 83° “normal” and 120° wide mode, both at 5MP output. There’s strong evidence this was a higher-res wide sensor being cropped for the normal view. You got some barrel distortion away from center, but it was a practical two-in-one solution for solo selfies and group shots.
Video recording was equally ambitious. Both rear cameras could shoot up to 4K at 30fps, plus 1080p at 30 or 60fps. 4K footage from the main cam was among the most detailed around, with vivid color and great contrast but some noise and bit-allocation quirks under heavy motion. 1080p/30 looked similarly strong; 1080p/60 was noticeably softer because the bitrate (24Mbps) simply wasn’t high enough to keep up with double the frame rate.
Where LG pushed the envelope was stabilization. Steady Record 2.0 used Qualcomm’s gyro-based EIS built into Snapdragon 820, layered on top of OIS. It analyzed 15–20 frames to reduce rolling shutter and keep subjects centered — but only in 1080p/30. No EIS at 1080p/60 or 4K, which limited the benefit for action-heavy shots.
Still, features like focus peaking in manual photo mode and directional audio control in video (prioritize front, rear, or balanced sound using all three mics) were the kind of pro-leaning tools that most brands still don’t bother with.
Nougat First, Heavy Multitasking, and Actual Power-User Features
The V20 didn’t just ship with Android 7.0 Nougat — it launched with it before even Google’s own Pixel phones went on sale. Nougat brought native split-screen multitasking, Quick Switch (double-tap recents to flip between your last two apps), improved Doze, and a reworked notification system with inline replies and per-app priority control.
On top of that, LG added its usual tricks: QSlide floating windows for a few core apps, a themeable UI, and the option to restore a traditional app drawer if you hated the all-on-homescreen layout. The second screen acted as an extension of this: shortcuts, quick toggles, and notification previews without waking the main display.
Storage management and privacy got some attention too. Scoped storage access limited apps to specific folders (if they supported it), and uninstalling an app didn’t nuke it immediately — it was disabled for 24 hours in case you changed your mind. Data Saver could block mobile background data per app, and updated Doze plus the efficient second screen gave the phone a 68-hour overall endurance rating in testing, even with the always-on strip active.
The ugly side: performance consistency. On paper, Snapdragon 820 with 4GB RAM should have put the V20 right alongside other 2016 flagships. In reality, benchmarks showed it near the bottom of the high-end pack, and more importantly, performance degraded on repeated runs. GFXBench 1080p Manhattan offscreen dropped from about 40fps on a first run to around 28fps after several, indicating heavy thermal throttling, especially on the GPU.
You could feel that in longer gaming sessions or sustained heavy loads. For day-to-day use it was fine — especially with Nougat’s under-the-hood optimizations and Vulkan API support — but this was not the Android phone you bought just to chase the highest synthetic scores.
Battery Life: Swappable Saves It From Mediocre Numbers
On paper, 3,200mAh for a 5.7-inch QHD IPS plus a second screen is modest. In testing, the V20’s battery life was mixed at best. Web browsing landed around 7:35 hours — matching the smaller G5 and falling short of rivals like the Pixel XL, Galaxy S7 edge, and Huawei Mate 9. Video playback hit roughly 8 hours, again lagging significantly behind those same phones.
Voice calls were the one standout, closing in on 20 hours in 3G talk tests and exceeding LG’s own spec sheet. Standby drain with the second screen always on (and forced to stay on, no pocket-off behavior) was surprisingly efficient, contributing to an overall endurance rating of 68 hours. That’s not terrible, but it’s clearly behind the best of its era.
The difference is that LG gave you an eject button. You weren’t stuck with that 3,200mAh pack for the life of the device. QC 3.0 fast charging, plus the option to literally drop in a full battery in seconds, made its mediocre screen-on stats far more tolerable for actual power users.
Why the V20 Still Matters for Consumers
The LG V20 is exactly the kind of phone the industry keeps telling us is “too niche” to justify, while enthusiast forums keep proving the opposite. It gave you:
- A durable metal body that still let you swap the battery.
- Dual cameras focused on utility (wide vs normal) instead of shallow depth-of-field parlor tricks.
- A genuine audio subsystem with quad DACs, high-SPL mics, and real recording controls.
- An always-on secondary display that added function, not just flair.
- Android 7.0 Nougat before Google’s own flagships.
Yes, it throttled under sustained GPU load. Yes, its battery life on a single charge was mediocre compared to S7 edge and Mate 9. And yes, LG’s strategic decision to keep it away from large parts of Europe limited its impact.
But for the people who actually needed these features — creators, tinkerers, early adopters — the V20 delivered a package that looked forward instead of sideways. This is the kind of product that pushes the bar for what a phone can be, and from a consumer standpoint, the fact that most big brands walked away from swappable batteries, serious audio hardware, and user-accessible design is still a loss.
If more modern flagships were built with this level of respect for how people actually use their phones, we’d all be better off.
Stay tuned to IntoDroid for more Android updates.
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