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back to article 'Leaky' LG returns to sanity for 2017 flagship

So this is how consumer electronics marketing works in 2017. LG is stoking interest in this year's flagship smartphone, the G6, by releasing an interview with a man who has actually seen one. The phone is officially due to be launched at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona on Sunday, but the modern marketing game involves …

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  1. djstardust

    LG

    They just keep floundering about hoping they'll hit the sweet spot at some point. no strategy at all, and the build quality on recent handsets has been atrocious.

    I do however like the screen ratio and DAC. Be interesting to see if this is the one .....

    Don't even start me on how bad LG UK customer support is either.

    1 1 Reply
    1. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: LG

      Their approach is obvious - try to do something different from the standard 2001 monolith with rounded corners. The experiments haven't been that successful - they seem to be discovering that most buyers are very conservative and want something familiar. This time round they are doing an experiment which doesn't look too different but the split screen could be useful.

      At least they (and Lenovo, Asus, Huawei, Oppo and Xiaomi) are still trying different things.

      1 0 Reply
      1. Dan 55 Silver badge
        Reply Icon

        Re: LG

        Ten years ago Nokia cornered every inch of the market with a load of wild and whacky designs. Now apparently if it's not a black slab people don't want to know and even LG's idea of changing the battery is enough to scare people off.

        I don't think people are that conservative, rather they didn't know the option existed. Most people assume phones are slabs anyway so don't look for anything else and just take what the saleman's pushing. LG would need a hell of a lot of advertising and commission to break that. Even if they did know, who'd rush out and buy unless the old one breaks or it's upgrade time?

        1 1 Reply
        1. Triggerfish
          Reply Icon

          Re: LG

          Now apparently if it's not a black slab people don't want to know and even LG's idea of changing the battery is enough to scare people off.

          Oh I liked the idea of changing the battery it's just the phone I looked at looked flimsy the way they had implemented it, I was not confident that was a phone that was going to last.

          0 0 Reply
    2. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: LG CS

      "Don't even start me on how bad LG UK customer support is either"

      Yeah, try buying a battery from them. Verbatim: "Sorry, we don't sell replacement batteries for our phones. Have you checked Amazon?"

      This was for the former flagship G4 - so not some random landfill.

      YFW? The whole point of a replaceable battery is to.......... be able to replace it with an identical one! I don't want some shonky 3rd party lipo!

      1 0 Reply

      1. This post has been deleted by its author

    3. ARGO
      Reply Icon

      Re: LG

      It seems LG have a UK-specific problem though - their phones sell rather well in some other European markets.

      0 0 Reply
    4. Youngone Silver badge
      Reply Icon

      Re: LG

      Yes, but come on you lot.

      The really important point here, is that the bloke in the video looks exactly like Tim Nice-But-Dim.

      0 0 Reply
  2. ForthIsNotDead

    LG?

    Wasn't it LG's telly's that were spewing out all sorts of private data to the LG mothership? Even file names of files from an inserted USB stick.

    Why would I want one of their phones?

    3 0 Reply
    1. John Brown (no body) Silver badge
      Reply Icon

      Re: LG?

      Yes, based on the headline, I was hoping (dreaming?) that the new LG USP would be all about privacy and not slurping up all your data back to the mothership. Oh well....

      0 0 Reply
    2. GrumpyOldBloke
      Reply Icon

      Re: LG?

      LG's boot-loop technology does help with privacy though it only appears in some phones.

      0 0 Reply
    3. AdamWill
      Reply Icon

      Re: LG?

      I wouldn't trust any kind of 'smart' telly as far as I could throw it, frankly. I've got one of LG's OLED models, but it only gets its network cable plugged in if I want to update the firmware.

      0 0 Reply
  3. I am the liquor

    18:9 aspect ratio

    Or 2:1, as those of us who completed year 4 maths would call it.

    29 0 Reply
    1. Martin an gof Silver badge
      Reply Icon
      Boffin

      Re: 18:9 aspect ratio

      Or 2:1

      Just one of those things. Screen widths have for some years generally been referred to as ratios to nine. It helps visualise the differences without having to convert to a common base, though there are some anomalies:

      • 640x480, 720x576 for TV or 800x600 and 1024x768 for computers is 4:3 is 12:9
      • 854x480 or 1024x576 is 16:9 (these are what SD TV is scaled to when anamorphic widescreen is used - i.e. non-square pixels)
      • the intermediate format 14:9 was once popular
      • 1440x1080 was once a common 12:9 "high definition" format, also used with non-square pixels to give "high definition" 16:9
      • 1280x720, 1600x900, 1920x1080 are all of course 16:9
      • Many "widescreen" films are presented in 21:9
      • On the other hand, that old stalwart 1280x1024 is actually 5:4 which is an ungainly 11¼:9
      • and 1280x800 or 1920 x 1200 (common with projectors I find, though not so common with monitors, worse luck) are 16:10

      I thank you.

      M.

      6 2 Reply
      1. John Brown (no body) Silver badge
        Reply Icon
        Thumb Up

        Re: 18:9 aspect ratio

        "I thank you."

        Yes, thanks, that was quite useful. On the other hand, I wonder if engineering came up with a 2:1 screen and marketing panicked at the tiny numbers and though people would assume it was a small screen and so came up with the 18:9 moniker?

        3 0 Reply
      2. I am the liquor
        Reply Icon

        Re: 18:9 aspect ratio

        I've never heard anyone refer to 4:3 as 12:9 before.

        I bet the truth is Non-corporeal John Brown's explanation. The engineers called it 2:1, because they can do fractions, and the marketing department were all like "Nooooo, must haz moar numberz."

        1 0 Reply
  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    If they'd have stuck with 16:9, they would have been able to display two apps side by side in perfect rectangles.

    And watching videos wouldn't be irritating.

    5 0 Reply
  5. Matt 43
    FAIL

    Non-Removable Battery == Downgrade

    I've been cautiously eyeing-up an LG since the battery went flaky in my Sony Z3 purely because LG were the only manufacturer to continue with replaceable batteries after everyone else started sealing theirs in.

    Now, it rather looks like they have screwed the pooch on the only USP they had which made me interested. I guess I could always get last year's model... :(

    It's absurd that these "flagship" phones have components which don't even last the length of a typical contract, let alone make it very difficult to replace the bits which fail.

    4 1 Reply
    1. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Non-Removable Battery == Downgrade

      "It's absurd that these "flagship" phones have components which don't even last the length of a typical contract"

      The clue is in "flagship". It's the one the admiral happens to be in, which may change more than once during a battle as the one he's in takes hits. In naval warfare the flagship may well be the first one sunk.

      Wake me up when there's a battleship phone. A bit behind the technology, heavy, not that fast but designed to take punishment and survive it for a long time.

      7 0 Reply
      1. Triggerfish
        Reply Icon

        Re: Non-Removable Battery == Downgrade

        TBH thats why I usually buy the model from the year before, it's quick enough for anything I use a phone for, and everyone else has spent a year taking it into the field so you know if it's any good.

        As for the compnents well think we are going to be stuck with the idea that batteries fixed into phones are the norm as long as reviews keep starting their reviews talking more about how cool the phone is now it is only x mm thick rather than what it is like as a smart device.There's no gain in a manufacturer making them easy to replace.

        0 0 Reply
  6. RDW

    This may be stating the obvious, but the 18:9 / 2:1 thing might be an attempt to make large screen phones that, for a given area, are still comfortable to hold with one hand. Shrinking the bezel will only take you so far. The downside is pillarboxed 16:9 video, and perhaps an over-stretched thumb!

    0 0 Reply
  7. NonSSL-Login
    Meh

    Broken glass

    The edge to edge glass is something desirable but unless they have some real voodoo magic to strengthen the screen the percentage phone users with a broken screen is going to increase.

    Users will need a real hefty case to protect it which then makes the edge to edge glass pointless as it now has a border.

    2 0 Reply
    1. Triggerfish
      Reply Icon

      Re: Broken glass

      Think you are going to find a lot of phones are getting these designs coming up, thee's a couple of chinese phones out already that are bezeless or virtually so.

      0 0 Reply
  8. joejack

    LG G4

    I bent/broke the headphone connector, lodging the tip in the phone. A quick YouTube video and a $7 part from Amazon, and I was able to take the phone apart and replace it myself. It's getting dated (broken NFC, tap-to-wake stopped working a few updates ago), but I'm not sure what I'd want to replace it with at this point.

    FWIW LG support in the USA has been good in my experience. I had to return because of the bootloop bug a while back - a free fix.

    1 0 Reply

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