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Çell, that’s it. After years of diligent work – albeit sometimes misguided – to carve out a niche for its smartphones, LG confirmed on Sunday that it is officially giving up on the mobile phone business.
Here’s what we know so far: existing LG phones will continue to receive support and software updates for a while, although exactly how long it depends on where you live. Meanwhile, retailers and operators who still have LG phones in stock will continue to sell them. In all, the company plans to close its mobile division by the end of July.
“The departure of the LG brand from the mobile space can be disappointing for some, but we are in an industry where articulating and doing what is in the best interests of employees and shareholders is also extremely important,” said the head of global communications for LG, Ken Hong, after the announcement went live. “As other beloved phone brands have demonstrated before us, it is a numbers game, not a popularity contest.”
In other words, it doesn’t matter how much people like a brand if they never buy the brand’s products, and Hong was indirectly referring to companies like Nokia and HTC. Still, I’m not sure if these examples work. After the disastrous sale of its mobile assets to Microsoft, Nokia began to focus purely on the sale of network equipment, but granted HMD a license to develop and sell Nokia-branded smartphones. And HTC, which sold most of its smartphone business to Google and now spends its days working on virtual reality headsets, still finds time to produce one or two phones in its native Taiwan.
Unless there are some super-secret negotiations still going on, I don’t think we can expect the same from LG, which, honestly, is a shame. LG has never been the largest and most important smartphone manufacturer, but consumers always benefit from more competition – this leads smartphone manufacturers to innovate faster and make these innovations more accessible. But nothing lasts forever.
Rather than sitting there looking sullen, though, I think we better spend our time remembering some of the truly amazing – and truly wild – phones that LG has made over the years.
The pre-smartphone years
Before Engadget, I worked at TechCrunch and before that, I spent my college years selling phones at Best Buy. And at that time, just before smartphones started to dominate the industry, LG made some of the best feature phones you could find.
When I was training to, you know, interact professionally with other humans, the first phone I showed you was the LG Fusic, a very common flip phone with a special touch. At the time, people were just beginning to think of their phones as music players, so the Fusic had a circular grouping of track controls just below the external screen. I don’t remember having sold many of them, but LG was right in one respect: in time, people would actually abandon their iPods, Zunes and Creative Zens and turn almost exclusively to their phones for fun.
Many other models remain stuck in my head after all these years. There were days when I sold nothing but the LG Shine, an exclusive AT&T slider phone, all in metal, with a small button for navigation. Like Fusic, it didn’t stand out beyond design, but you should remember that, at that time, all you could do on the phone was to call people, send text messages or browse relatively glacial mobile data networks. When feature sets were so limited, style undoubtedly counted for much more than now.
And then there were the LG messaging phones. Engadget’s head of social media, Mike Morris, often mentions the strange name of LG The V in random conversations, and for good reason. It was one of LG’s first phones with a full physical, though tiny, QWERTY keyboard, and he spent hours using it to send messages to his friends on AOL Instant Messenger.
“For people who weren’t on T-Mobile or couldn’t afford a Sidekick, that was the second best thing in my 14-year-old mind,” he says.
Following the success of The V, LG and Verizon (the current parent company of Engadget) doubled the messaging trend with a series of enVs, more capable models with support for EV-DO data and enhanced flip-open keyboards. Engadget senior editor Karissa Bell told me that she “was never able to text as quickly” as she could in her red wine enV 2, and considering how many of those I sold at that time, I doubt she is alone.
Eventually, the enV line gave way to what in my mind was the pinnacle of LG’s non-smartphones in the United States: Voyager, which took the idea of a flip-open messaging phone and married it to an external touch screen and a 2 megapixel camera. Looking back, it’s hard to imagine it being one of the most anticipated phones of 2007, but there were at least a few people camped outside my store waiting to shell out $ 300 with a two-year contract.
Of course, anyone who knew that LG’s best products could only be found abroad. In the same year that Voyager was launched, LG started selling its all-touch Prada, also known as KE850. Despite including a 2 MP camera with Schneider-Kreuznach optics and the first capacitive touchscreen on a phone, the Prada has failed to match the luxury of its namesake. With no Wi-Fi and a paltry 8 MB (yes, megabytes) of storage, everything packaged in a tiny black plastic body meant that the Prada was flash and low on substance. It wasn’t until the debut of the beautiful Chocolate BL40 in 2009 that LG’s signature phones really peaked. But then, it was clear that smartphones are here to stay.
Embracing Android
LG’s first batch of Android phones didn’t have much to write home about. The 2009 Arena was basically one of the company’s messaging phones with a sliding QWERTY keyboard, only with enhanced specs to help you run Android 1.0. It took a few more years for LG engineers to reach their performance with devices like the LG Optimus G Pro in 2013. Reviews at the time praised its performance and its 5.5 inch 1080p IPS screen, making it one of the first big phones .
We didn’t know it at the time, but the Optimus G Pro started the oldest LG smartphone family, the G series. And I would say that the company’s next G phone – the LG G2 – was what made it a serious competitor in the market. of smartphones. The big screen and the powerful specifications aside, what still haunts me in the G2 was LG’s ingenious decision to place the phone’s power and volume buttons on the back. This meant not only that LG could reduce the bezels, but the way in which the positioning of the buttons ensured that lefties and righties could reach the controls. (It’s 2021 and I still want more smartphone makers to do that.)
Right at the time when Optimus G Pro was making waves, Google chose LG for what would become a multi-year deal. LG’s mission: to build a series of affordable Nexus smartphones to show what pure, unrestricted Android can do with the right hardware. This business started with the Nexus 4, a phone that will be etched in my memory for a long time. It’s not because I was crazy about this thing, mind you – it’s because I worked on my review while I was stuck in San Francisco, while my home state was being hit by Hurricane Sandy. Those were my most depressing days at work, but I had work to do and, luckily, there was a lot to like.
“What is most striking about my Nexus 4 is that it may have been the last time I was extremely excited about a new phone,” said Engadget senior editor Richard Lawler. “He had a cool wireless charger when it was still exciting, and even Photo Sphere was an interesting feature at the time. Best of all, it corresponded to the hype. “
LG’s partnership with Google ended up yielding two more smartphones, the Nexus 5 and the 5X, which debuted with critical acclaim, but ended up leaving many of us at Engadget quite dissatisfied in the long run. I clearly remember loving my Nexus 5 and using it until it got stuck in a boot loop, like so many LG phones from that generation. And a quick poll of our team, Slack, confirmed that almost all Engadget employees who bought a Nexus 5X saw it die prematurely.
Let’s get weird
I always believed that LG was at its best when it was weird. And as the smartphone era progressed, the company began to lean towards its strange trends. In 2014 the LG G Flex was launched, one of the first phones with a curved screen. Samsung won by launching the Galaxy Round a year earlier, but at least in my book, LG’s approach was better. Instead of curving the left and right edges of the phone towards you, as the Galaxy Round did, the G Flex had curved top and bottom edges, which made calls surprisingly comfortable.
The most ambitious device that LG has ever built, however, was definitely the modular G5 of 2016. If you want physical controls for the camera or a dedicated digital to analog converter for better music quality, you can add them. All you had to do was remove the battery, pull out your chin, plug in the accessory you needed, and plug it all in again. It was not the most elegant process, but for a while, at least, this type of modularity seemed to represent the future of smartphones. Google had been publicizing its Project Ara phones for years, and a few months after the G5 hit stores, Motorola started selling the Moto Z and its magnetic Moto Mods.
Unfortunately, all of these initiatives failed, but the G5 offered another reason to remember: it was one of the first phones to use multiple rear cameras, and you don’t need me to say how well this idea worked Out.
The G5 probably represented LG in its weirdest form, but in the years that followed LG continued to try some crazy things. The LG G8 was anything but remarkable, except for a light-time camera attached to its forehead. You can try to control your music or change the volume of the phone by making some difficult gestures to preach in front of it. (Google would later try something similar with a tiny Soli radar set on the Pixel 4.) While we’re talking about G8s, I’ll never forget to tie the LG G8x to a dual-screen case for the first time to play a game with controls on the second screen, and wondering if the LG team was on the right track. It turns out they weren’t, but you have to give them credit for trying.
And there’s the LG Wing, the dual-screen rotary phone that LG launched last year. It was the first – and the last – device to emerge from the company’s Explorer program, an initiative designed to keep LG experimenting with new things while its competitors limited themselves to making the same old glass and metal plates. To this day, I’m still not sure what LG engineers were smoking when they invented this, but the boldness they showed in putting the Wing up for sale is admirable. Frankly, I can’t think of a more appropriate swan song: it is eccentric, ambitious and more than a little charming, much like LG itself.