I fell in love with this TV for its visual characteristics. Blacks are pitch black, colors are vibrant, images are amazingly crisp, brightness is plenty good and better than any other OLED I've looked at, and responsiveness is fantastic. If this was available as a monitor only, with zero onboard "intelligence", I'd rate it 5 stars, even considering the price. So I bought one.
I foolishly did NOT try out the WebOS interface, or the ThinQ app. How bad could it be, right? Wrong. The on-TV native WebOS looks like an advertising shotgun is being fired at your face, non stop. You can't delete apps you don't like or don't need (like LG Channels, or AppleTV, and tens more silly apps and "features", for example. Useless. Its like the bloatware you can't uninstall from your phone.) You can't remove things like "Now Trending", which is NOT things coming from your chosen streaming services but instead a bunch of ad driven content, from your "Home Screen". The apps you do manage to load (like Hulu, netflix, Prime video) are tiny little itty bitty icons at the bottom of the "Home Screen", there's no way I've found to make them bigger. And you can sort where those tiny icons appear in the tiny scrollbar, but sometimes, even with the feature to sort icons based on use turned off, sometimes they just slide down the line and LG Channels pops back into first. Which I never use and never will. Also, you can't remove "Popular Games", which, seriously, who uses a TV OS to play games?!? And there are SO many more useless, cluttered, overly-large-compared-to-importance "bars" you cannot delete. And I put "Home Screen" in quotes since, thus far, I'm unable to make that "Home Screen" what the TV launches into on power up. It instead doggedly complains about "no input found" for antenna/cable and shows a no signal on channel 2 popup. Incidentally, I replied NONE to TV sources during install. Reinstalled from factory reset twice, to make sure I did it right. STILL won't launch into the busy busy busy "Home Screen". My old $59 Roku has a VASTLY superior interface. No kidding. VASTLY.
So I tried the ThinQ android app. Should be better, right? Hah. Forces location to be turned on and permission to be granted to even add my $4,000 new TV to it. Because me and the TV and the tablet being in the same room on the same WLAN isn't enough. LG needs location data harvesting enabled, too. Weak. So I relent, turn it on, and what do i get? A super lame black and white outline like a kid would draw of a functionality crippled "remote". On, off, volume, source. OH! And for some reason, after creating an account, enabling location, loading app, connecting tablet to TV, now LG decides I want a total garbage low res 320x200 looking IP TV service to start streaming 60's westerns and Euro music channels onto my screen every time I don't touch a control at the WebOS landing screen for a few minutes!
Love the screen. I DESPISE WebOS and DESPISE ThinQ. If you think this price is fair for a fantastic monitor and have something else to drive it with, buy it. But if you plan to use the on-box interface instead of a Roku or Shield or something, RUN. I could not be more disappointed with my purchase. I'm still considering returning it, the OS and app are that bad.
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