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| LG |
In the recent years, LG hasn't really featured strongly in the mobile world.Don't misunderstand me: in the era of the featurephones, LG was quite a sensation, bringing us aspirational designs like the Chocolate series and VX8700 for Verizon Wireless, and the Fusic/Music line for Sprint. It even provided Verizon’s headlining Apple competitors back in the pre-3G days of the iPhone in the form of the EnV device family. Internationally, it pumped out incredible designs like the mouthwatering BL40.
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| LG Feature phone |
Then came the era of smartphones. Not just the smartphone-market shakeup Apple accomplished with the iPhone -which LG managed to use to its advantage with its own wave of carrier-branded competitors like the EnV and Voyager- but the sudden influx of smartphones into the consumer space. As RIM, Microsoft, Palm, Google, and Apple started taking consumers into the smartphone world, hardware partners started gaining traction along with them. The smartphone explosion catapulted HTC into relevance and slingshotted Samsung into orbit, where it recently surpassed Nokia to become the world’s top handset vendor. Meanwhile, we’ve seen LG dwindle in scale, cutting its Windows Phone offerings amid conflicting statements about its future support for the platform, and professing a new focus on Android.
That focus shift, if unfortunate for lovers of Windows Phone, might actually be a tactically sound move for LG; it’s certainly worked out well for rival Samsung. And indeed, LG has managed to consistently make headlines with its Android offerings, churning out a bevy of “firsts.” The company was the first to roll out a dual-core Android smartphone, and the first to offer a glasses-free 3D smartphone. We expect to see the company unveil another first-in-class very shortly as it takes the wraps off the Optimus G, the world’s first smartphone packing Qualcomm’s Snapdragon S4 Pro, which will offer LTE and quad-core performance on the same chip. Clearly, the company hasn't been standing still.But the company also fails in some crucial areas. Here’s the top reasons LG hasn’t yet caught up to Samsung in the mobile-technology arena, and why it might not ever do so.
1.Ugly Software
The discussion about Android skins has been a long, involved one. Android devices now feature skins more often than not. In the case of some manufacturers, like Samsung, HTC, and even Huawei, that’s not an entirely bad thing. There’s been a steady trend toward adding features without increasing lag, so skins are less onerous than they once were.
LG’s unimaginatively named “LG UI” doesn’t necessarily increase lag, but it doesn’t offer much in the way of utility. As we saw during our hands-on with the Optimus L9 in Berlin (linked previously), the latest iteration affords users extensive options for customizing app icons and transition effects, and it’s quite responsive in version 3.0. But its visual design is stuck in the Gingerbread era, it’s beset by typos in our Intuition review unit, and it doesn’t offer enough compelling set-offs to justify its inclusion over stock Android. Especially considering the inevitable update delay all skins cause.
2.Poor Hardware
That rundown of well-crafted LG devices above was fun to write, but in retrospect it’s quite depressing. The company hasn’t cobbled together a truly good device in years. That’s speaking from a visual standpoint; LG has certainly made headlines by beating others to the market with innovative new features.It even implements traditional -some might say old-fashioned- features like hardware keyboards quite well; but these quality implementations always seem to be wrapped in a casing that’s dull at best.
These are the main reasons why LG is not being able to make the headlines.But with launch of extremely impressive LG Optimus G and the soon-to-be-launched Nexus 4,the tables just might turn in LG's favour,who knows!
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