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| LG unveils G2 smartphone |
That's the headline design initiative in the LG Electronics G2 smartphone that was unveiled at a New York City press event Wednesday morning and that the company says will reach U.S. consumers in the fall. It's not meant to be a pejorative.
The rear of the phone is where LG designers have placed the physical power control and volume switch, as opposed to the sides or top where such smartphone buttons typically reside. The back of the phone is also where your index finger usually is when the device is held up to your ear during a call.
"For too long we have been blaming fingers for smartphone drops that were simply not their fault," says James Fishler, LG Electronics USA's senior vice president for marketing. "It sounds so simple but is a big design enhancement."
It seems to make sense, but I'll have to live with the phone for a while to see if I ultimately agree. My first inclination when I picked up the device at the launch event was to navigate my own paws to the side. So it looks like it will take getting used to.
The South Korean manufacturer has added other simple but potentially important innovations. If you get a call, you can merely pick up the phone to answer it, just like the good old days when we answered calls on corded telephones just by answering the phone. LG's innovation here would let you answer a call, say, in the cold of winter without having to remove your gloves. And don't worry about the ringtone blasting your eardrum — the volume is automatically reduced when the phone gets closer to your ear.
LG is actually making a big deal about the studio sound that's built into the phone, so much so that it is preloading ring tones recorded by the Vienna Boys' Choir — one of the members of the choir sang during the launch event, held appropriately at a Lincoln Center jazz venue.
Meanwhile, the G2 has a bezel-to-bezel 5.2-inch full-high-definition IPS display that LG claims is the largest screen size on a phone that is still comfortable to hold. The phone is very thin. It runs on Android Jelly Bean 4.2.2, the version on many high-end rival phones.
Inside sits a premium quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 processor and 32 GB of internal storage. There is no expansion option, but LG customers do get up to 50 GB of free online storage through Box. LG is promising an all-day battery.
The G2 has included optical image stabilization inside its 13-megapixel rear camera that LG says can reduce the blur when you capture still pictures in a moving vehicle and help minimize the shakes when you are shooting video. I need to test out the claim.
Among the other features: You can knock on the screen twice to wake it up or shut it off, which is nice but not entirely original. There's a Guest Mode that promises to let you share the phone with your kids while restricting access to the apps that they can use. Another feature summons the appropriate apps when you plug in a pair of headphones, while pushing to the background the apps that you are unlikely to use at that point.
LG said the device will be available through all the major U.S. carriers but hasn't announced pricing or precise timing.
The company faces the obvious challenge of competing in the hotly contested mobile category against all the usual suspects — Apple, Samsung, HTC, Nokia, a re-energized (under Google) Motorola and others.
"LG is not a small company without resources," says analyst Avi Greengart of Current Analysis. "If they can adequately fund a good advertising campaign, they should be able to compete. But it's an incredibly competitive segment."
I plan to take a closer look at the G2 when review units become available.
