The next flagship smartphone from LG will be called the LG G7 ThinQ. It’s the successor to the LG G6 and it comes a little bit later in the year than usual. With the official announcement right around the corner on May 2nd, we thought we would ruin the surprise for you and give you a rundown on the specs and features of the G7 ThinQ since pretty much everything has been leaked already.

First of all, the design is going to be very similar to what other Android OEMs are doing with their smartphones these days. There’ll be an edge-to-edge display with a notch for the camera and the call speaker up top here. A metal frame will extend to all four sides to give the phone a little bit more rigidity and there will be a glass back to allow for features like wireless charging. Now if you’re not a fan of the notch, don’t worry. There will be a software update or feature to extend the black bar across and essentially create a thick artificial bezel up top.

So what I find particularly interesting with the G7 is actually the display. The V30 was LG’s first OLED Full Vision smartphone so one would assume that LG’s foreseeable flagships would also employ OLED displays but that’s actually not the case. LG’s expected to go back to LCDs. The 6.1-inch “Super Bright” MLCD+ QHD display in the G7 is supposed to require less power consumption and sharper colors than an OLED panel without the higher cost associated with an OLED panel. The brightness is actually supposed to offer a thousand nits so outdoor visibility should be fantastic and on par with the Galaxy Note 8 and Galaxy S9. There are certainly some pros and cons with each display type but personally, I do prefer OLED panels for their vivid colors and exceptional contrast ratios.

When Samsung launched the Galaxy S8 last year, it came with this physical button to summon Bixby, Samsung’s digital voice assistant. LG is going to do something very similar to the G7 except instead of Bixby, the physical button will summon Google Assistant, which I think is a very smart move because honestly, any sort of LG digital assistant is going to be garbage, let’s be honest. And what’s cool is that you might even have the option to reprogram what the button does. We’re just going to have to wait and see.

The area that is still a little bit murky is how exactly LG is going to market the G7 as an AI-centric smartphone. We know that it’s going to have this AI button to activate Google Assistant and I’m sure there’s going to be some other AI camera features but what exactly the features will entail is not entirely known at this time. But given the “ThinQ” name, it’s clear that LG will try and market the AI features of this new smartphone in some way, shape or form.

In terms of performance, we’re looking at a Snapdragon 845 processor under the hood with 4GB of RAM and Android 8.0 Oreo. The hardware is going to be very capable. It’s going to be able to run very much whatever you throw at it-- high-end games, FortNite, PubG; whatever you want, it’s probably going to handle it pretty well. But I think the addition of 2 extra GB of RAM to round it up at 6GB of RAM or maybe even 8 would really be nice to see. But it’s not looking that way.

The LG G7 is going to be armed with a 16-megapixel dual-camera setup with the main shooter having an f/1.6 aperture so it will excel in low-light photography. And there should be an accompanying wide-angle sensor here as well. The wide-angle sensor is just a trademark LG feature at this point, dating back to the LG G5.

The main camera sensor in LG’s flagship smartphones for the last several years have always been able to capture some fantastic results, often giving Apple and Samsung a run for their money. But the addition of a wide-angle sensor just makes shooting so much more fun as you can just capture big, beautiful landscape images. If LG is able to widen the aperture some more for the wide-angle sensor, I would be all the happier as low-light performance tends to suffer more for this sensor than the main sensor.

Finally, we can talk about the price of this handset which should be somewhere between $650 and $800, which is what the LG G6 and LG V30 ended up costing, respectively. Since LG is opting in for an LCD panel instead of an OLED panel, it should help lower the cost of this handset quite a bit.

So once again, mark your calendar for May 2nd because that is when the LG G7 ThinQ will be officially announced. And that is when we will learn about some of the software features and hardware features of this new smartphone. With the phone expected to launch on all four major carriers here in the US, our question to you is: will the LG G7 ThinQ be your next smartphone? Bonus points if you’re currently using an LG smartphone and share your experiences with us.