Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “LG Smartphones: The Real Firsts”.
Hello again, ladies and gentlemen, i’m joe hendy from android authority.com. We recently said goodbye to lg, as they exited a smartphone market. They were no longer able to keep up with lg’s impact on the smartphone world is more complicated than you might think, and we’re going to talk about it. Let’S get started so here’s the thing.
The first part of this video is going to sound like a hit piece, but if you bear with me and get through these spider webs, i promise i can tell you some really cool things that lg did in the smartphone world. I just felt the need to clear up some slight misconceptions before i proceed. Lg technically was the first oem to do a lot of things. Some of those things include the first dual core processor, with the lg optimus 2x, the first quad core processor, with the lg optimus 4x. The first qhd display with the lg g3, the first by 9 aspect ratio with the lg g6 and the first phone with a 1080p display, also courtesy of the lg 2x. It even had the first capacitive touchscreen with the lg prada on the surface.
It would seem that lg was quite the pioneer. However, if you go just one layer deeper, a lot of these assertions start to fall apart. The lg optimus 2x was the first phone with a dual core processor and the optimus 4x was in fact the first phone with a quad-core processor.
However, neither of those cpus were made by lg. They were made by nvidia and lg. Wasn’T the only oem to use nvidia’s tegra chips for the tegra 2 dual core motorola tesla motors lg, samsung, t-mobile, acer, dell, toshiba and vue sonic all used them in products for the tegra 3 quad core. The list extends to asus microsoft, sony, the ill-fated ouya and htc. So to me, nvidia deserves the credit for those achievements. It was, after all, their product. Lg was the first to use it, but lg didn’t have a hand in making it. So i’m giving credit for those accomplishments to nvidia, especially since a lot of folks think it was qualcomm that did those things.
This logic is widely applicable to a lot of lg firsts. There were roughly a dozen phones with 18 by nine displays by the end of 2017, the lg g6’s launch year. Additionally, while the lg prada was the first smartphone with a capacitive touchscreen, the technology was largely produced by synaptics the same one. That makes almost all laptop track pads.
Even the lg v10 is often incorrectly cited as having the first secondary ticker display the samsung continuum. I-400, a verizon exclusive. Had this secondary ticker display approximately five years before the lg v10s launch. Lg definitely took advantage by being speedy with its phone designs and its willingness to take risks.
That said, it’s difficult for me to call lg a pioneer for being the first to do something when it had very little to do with the creation or production of that something. I feel like it’s a bit of a tired narrative and i’m going to bypass it entirely to talk about the actually important things that lg did in the smartphone world. Let’S start with the things that lg did, that nobody was doing, and now everybody does the best and most notable example is the ultra wide camera. When lg first introduced the feature in 2016, there were four total phones with it, and two of them were lg phones fast forward to 2018 and 27.
Total phones boasted the feature and a third of them were still lg phones with some smatterings of other oems. If you fast forward a mere three more years to today, nearly 800 devices now rock an ultra wide camera sensor, including the top of the line flagships from most phone manufacturers, including samsung apple, google, huawei and oneplus. That number grows every month as more and more phones launch with it. With the time it took to adopt the feature.
It’S pretty evident that most other oems didn’t have ultrawide lenses on their radar at all. Before lg showed off the benefit of having one lg. Would press on with the lg v40 the first phone to use a telephoto, regular and ultra wide camera lens? In 2018, only four devices carried that camera setup and today that number is over 90, including top end flagships from sony, samsung, huawei, apple and xiaomi. This number inflates, when you take into consideration the number of phones without a telephoto lens, but with an optical zoom, feature that mimics the same functionality as a telephoto lens. The ultra wide, regular and telephoto setup lives on today. Even if it’s not in the same form as it was on the lg v40 and it’s still considered the most versatile mobile phone camera setup, good job lg, no one can rob you of that.
One lg was always known as an oem that cared about the audio quality in its smartphones. Most would cite the dac in most v-series smartphones. As an example of this, the thing is, most other oems didn’t copy, lg’s love for wired audio. So it’s difficult to call.
Lg influential in this regard, in fact, most oems removed the 3.5 millimeter headphone jack entirely, meaning lg was going in the opposite direction, but lg wasn’t just about wired audio. The company also embraced higher quality and more advanced bluetooth. Codecs long before anybody else app decks had been around for decades, but up until the 2010s, it was notably absent from smartphones. Lg was almost certainly the first oem to jump on that bandwagon in terms of bluetooth, codecs.
The lg optimus g pro from 2013 was most likely the first phone with app dex, while the lg g5 from 2016 was definitely the first phone to have aptx hd at the time. Virtually all other oems did the bare minimum in terms of wireless audio, with the possible exception of sony with its proprietary ldac bluetooth codec with the quad dac and app deck support. Lg phones really were the best when it came to audio, whether it be wired or wireless. In 2017, google added support for aptx aptx hd and sony’s lvac in the release of android oreo every phone launched since then, now has more advanced codecs by default.
Even if other oems didn’t pay attention to lg, it was fairly evident. Google was paying attention lg always promoted itself as being a company serious about audio quality. Most focused on the wired audio aspect, which left lg’s contribution to wireless audio, widely overlooked and under-appreciated. Lg was just as serious about wireless audio quality and after google gave that functionality to every smartphone. It’S something consumers don’t have to worry about anymore thanks. Lg lg had some other firsts as well that other oems eventually copied, but they were pretty minor.
For instance, the classic knock on or double tap to wake function started on lg smartphones, and now you can find them on most smartphones. Some people like to make stuff like that into a bigger deal than it actually is it’s cool, but it didn’t really have a huge impact. That said, i’m not one to ignore a real first when i see one but the thing that lg may have had the most impact on, despite not being the first or the last company to do.
It was a lesson the company imparted to all of the other oems when your smartphone starts breaking from a systemic mechanical defect. Don’T do what lg did for those who don’t remember. The issue was primarily on the lg g4. Up to that point, lg had some incredible momentum and people generally like their smartphones. However, some bad component soldering caused weak connections that eventually broke, resulting in boot loops and shortly thereafter, phone death lg was radio silent on the issue for an unacceptable amount of time, letting complaints pile up on reddit, youtube and social media. Eventually, they figured out the issue and promised to fix the affected devices.
Unfortunately, they didn’t do a great job of it. A lot of people were turned away for being out of warranty, despite it being a manufacturer defect. Additionally, the phones that lg did actually repair didn’t always stay repaired, forcing people to send their most important communication device back in for a second repair that often took weeks to process after a while additional reports from lg customers suggested that the issue might also affect the Lg v10, v20, g3 and g5. None of those devices ever receive the treatment of the g4, leaving a lot of lg customers in the wind with broken devices. Of course, many people switch to another oem after that and stayed there permanently.
In short, it was a huge disaster, most devices didn’t have any issues, but there were enough devices with the issue that it salted the earth in terms of lg’s credibility. People to this day still talk about how they won’t buy an lg device due to the issue. Despite the issue being fixed long ago and lg extending their phone warranties to double the original length, you can see how the fallout from that event affected, how other oems did business. For instance, when the ill-fated galaxy note 7 started blowing up just two years later, the company immediately held itself accountable, took the device off of store shelves, kept the public updated on its process to find the root cause, stopped, producing the phone entirely and encouraged people to Return to the outlet they purchased the devices from for a refund or an exchange to a different device.
Why was samsung so aggressive because it allowed them to take control of the situation and make their customers feel taken? Care of this helps samsung mount a massive comeback in the next year and return to being the most popular android oem to this day, lg by contrast, didn’t take control. Let social media drive the narrative and didn’t make their customers feel taken care of now lg’s dead. The difference is not hard to see so, like all the other tech youtubers here is my armchair oem ceo opinion on why lg didn’t make it after the lg g3, the company had some amazing momentum, and that was immediately snuffed out by the lg g4 fiasco. Instead of returning to form a year later, lg launched the g5 a quirky smartphone that nobody liked out of the gate.
Now don’t get me wrong. I know that the phone had some fans, but if you look at the sales numbers, it never really did that. Well, and so i don’t think that people enjoy the premise of it and plus the lg g4 fiasco really left the sour taste in people’s mouths from there lg failed to follow several key trends.
Camera post processing was making huge strides and lg cameras simply didn’t keep up when lg was still putting three thousand milliamp hour batteries in their flagships. Other oems were topping the four 000 milliamp hour mark sure. Average consumers may not understand battery size numbers, but they understand it.
When people praised one phone’s battery life and criticized lg’s, you can find tons of examples of lg struggling to keep up and failing to do so. Lg had the first triple camera setup with the telephoto, regular and wide-angle lens. But if you look at the same photo with all three, the white balance was different with all three cameras resulting in a negative overall experience. The lg v60 had a massive battery, but its 1080p display didn’t come with a high refresh rate like every other flagship phone had in 2020.. Other oems were moving to pinhole displays right when lg finally decided to try the notch. Other oems started taking security updates more seriously and streamlining their software as early as 2017, while lg didn’t really start trying any of that stuff until 2020.. You see where i’m going with this after the lg g4 and the failure of the g5 lg’s attempts were a day late and a buck short, as the old saying goes even up through its most recent efforts, sure they tried some fun stuff, like the self-healing back. The modular concept, the full curve on the g flex and the quirky slider functionality of the lg wing people just didn’t want it and lg’s marketing department didn’t make us want it.
So i’m going to end this video by telling you a story that sums up lg’s. Last few years perfectly as a smartphone manufacturer, when the lg g8 came out, lg boasted about its really cool vane. Reading features that let you unlock and control your phone with hand, gestures, i’m sure you’ve already heard the stories about how hard that feature bombed and how inconsistent it was. A few months after its launch we’re recording an episode of the android authority podcast with juan carlos bagnell, one of only two tech bloggers.
I might add me being the other that was actually a huge fan of lg and then he dropped this bomb on the podcast. The time of flight sensor and this depth tracking info it’s similar to what we saw in the rear of the nokia 9. There are some phenomenal applications that we haven’t discovered. Yet for this kind of hardware, i don’t think they’ll be realized on the g8, but to sit there and complain about air gestures means that you are focusing on the icing of the tasty security cake.
The tasty security cake is, you have apple grade, face unlock. This is a truly a much more secure platform. You do not get that warning that you get on a samsung. Oh, when you train your face for face unlock. This is a less secure security method. You don’t get that on an lg because we’re actually modeling. This is going to be substantially harder to fool than just an image based uh camera sensor security platform. So, knowing that, let me ask you, dear viewers, would you have more strongly considered getting an lg g8 if lg’s marketing team had told you that it had nearly apple id levels of face, unlock security instead of those goofy half-broken hand, gestures? If i were a betting man, i’d say the answer to that question is yes and that’s the reason that lg failed, even when they had a really good idea. They just had to cover it up with an even bigger bad idea, even if it was the wrong way, it was still damn fun to watch goodbye lg, i’m gon na miss you and that about does it for this one folks, if you like this video, you Know what to do, and if not, you still know what to do. We have some old lg articles and that podcast linked up in the video description below for more details, if you’re interested, as always thanks for watching everybody and have a wonderful day, .