We&ve already known about the G8 ThinQ for some months now.

And a few weeks back, LG made the whole camera rig official, announcing that the handset would be getting a ToF image sensor on its front-facing camera, bring, among other things, advanced face unlock technology.

The company did manage to save a few tricks for the product announcement, including a strange little biometric addition.

LG says the phone Hand ID tech is the first to use &advanced palm vein authentication& — which could well be accurate.

Certainly it not a mainstream feature yet. And I&ll give it to LG, Hand ID is a much catchier name than &palm vein unlock,& which is one of the creepier sounding smartphone features in recent memories.

Still, the underlying technology is actually pretty cool here, once you&re down shuddering from how weird the whole thing is on the face of it.

From the company press materials, &LG Hand ID identifies owners by recognizing the shape, thickness and other individual characteristics of the veins in the palms of their hands.& It turns out, like faces and fingerprints, everyone got a unique set of hand veins, so once registered, you can just however your hot blue blood tubes over the handset to quickly unlock in a few seconds. The Z camera also does depth-sensing face unlock that a lot harder to spoof than the kind found on other Android handsets.

LG also put the tech to use for a set of Air Motion gestures, which allow for hands-free interaction with various apps like the camera (selfies) and music (volume control).

I played around with the feature, and if I&m being totally honest, it takes some getting used to.

You&ve got to train yourself to get things just right, which could well dissuade most users from any sort of long-term adoption of features that can pretty quickly with accomplished with a tap. Other notable features for the new flagship include a 6.1 QHD+ OLED display and a new video portrait mode, which lets users adjust bokeh on the fly.

The handset will hit the States &in the coming weeks.& Pricing is still TBD, but I anticipate that it will cost around the same a previous LG flagships.