[LG V20 Questions & Answers] br0adband:
The V20 is a fine device, yes even today so the naysayers and ne'er-do-wells in this thread automagically telling anyone to avoid it - considering everything it offers that can't really be found on most if any of the flagships available today - is a bit ludicrous. It gets the job done just fine, Oreo is now available for it (save for the US996 but that could become available any day now whenever LG gets around to it), and of the variants out there I would say - if you're in the US - the best variant to get is the T-Mobile H918 model which allows for easy bootloader unlocking, Oreo is now out (and we just got our first security patch for that a few days ago), it has some custom ROMs available that get good reviews (but you will lose some functionality, the second screen support is barely there but it does exist to various degrees, both Nougat and Oreo), and of course all the other good things about the phone are great.

The Snapdragon 820 even in spite of being a lowly quad core SoC is still damned powerful and fast. The 4GB RAM is more than enough today, there are a multitude of tweaks and custom kernels to improve things, TWRP is actively developed for the V20, and the device just works. Yes it has some screen retention issues at times, on some people's devices it's more noticeable, on others - like on mine - it's just not something to focus on nearly as much as some people do. The 820 does hardware accelerated h.265 8 and 10 bit decoding too so that's a plus if you're a media hound like a lot of people too.

$230 for a used V20 is kinda steep - I paid $110 for my H918 from an eBay seller and it was shipped to my door for that much, no issues so far aside from the rear camera having some focus issues but I resolved that by buying a new camera module and I'm good to go so I've put $138 into my V20 and it works damned near flawlessly at this point.

H918

- Easily unlocked bootloader

- Installing TWRP is fairly idiot proof as well

- Rooting is possible but a bit more complex in methodology, it's actually easier to just flash a pre-rooted stock ROM and probably faster too

- Stock rooted Oreo 20g and you can roll back to Nougat with no issues (at least up to the present time, nobody knows if T-Mobile might alter the ARB variable at a later time)

- Latest Vulkan GPU drivers (I don't really need them since I don't play games or do much that ever even kicks the GPU into action but I figured it can't hurt to install 'em)

- High Impedance mode for the DAC is enabled permanently because I changed a variable in build.prop so it was always on regardless of the headset/IEMs I use

- I use UAPP (USB Audio Player PRO) to always use the ESS DAC (and not the Snapdragon DAC as part of the SoC) for all audio playback of local files and streaming audio from Shoutcast-capable streams

- IR blaster is something I use quite a bit - my Wife is deaf and sometimes we'll go to places that have TVs like a doctor's office lobby or something similar and they rarely enable the closed captioning or subtitles on their TVs so, I do it myself so my Wife can keep up with what's going on even in spite of their inconsiderate attention to details

- Modified thermal config file to ensure I get minimal lag and throttling - using the CPU Throttling Test app I get no less than 83% throttling (not much at all really) after 15 minutes of testing, with the stock thermal conf it'll throttle down as low as 45% depending on temps

- mk2000 kernel which improves performance and battery life (modified stock kernel)

It just works for me, but as I said, you can find a great V20 for a lot less than $230, absolutely. Hell, Woot.com was selling refurbs a few weeks ago for $140 iirc, a lot of people pounced on those when it happened according to what I had read about the deal.

It's a fantastic piece of hardware, but not it's not perfect, nothing ever is. For the price, and for what it offers, it's still pretty damned hard to beat even today.