An LG Spokesperson spoke at Mobile World Congress today, basically talking about the company’s update process. And while many other OEMs have promised updates for many of their devices, LG is taking a different approach. They’ve decided to prioritize updates for their G-Series devices, that’s the G2, G Flex and G Pro. While their other phones, like their mid-range and low-end stuff, aren’t getting update commitments. Now that doesn’t mean they won’t be updated, that just means they aren’t promising an update to the LG Spectrum 2. So that way if you get it you’ll be happy, and if you don’t, you won’t be complaining about it.
Here’s what LG’s Ken Hong had to say on the issue with updates:
“We are definitely prioritizing upgrades for the G-series, looking at the G2, G Flex and G Pro first … but beyond that, we aren’t going to make a commitment to definite upgrades because it’s not totally up to us. Some carriers may not want the upgrade. It’s an added level of complexity even for their engineers. If they want to do it, we’ll definitely work closely with carriers to do it. In some cases we will push it forward, like with G2”
This is very interesting, as many of us forget how the carriers can be. Sometimes they just don’t want to update an older device, which was a prime example with the HTC Thunderbolt, and why it took nearly a year to get ICS on there. However, the carrier situation only really applies to the US and maybe Canada. As most others in the world don’t have to wait on the carrier to certify an update before rolling it out. That is why we often see international variants of a device get an update before anyone else.
Another interesting thing here is that LG is looking to change their willingness to make slight changes on some of their devices. You may remember that the G2 on Verizon has a different back and back buttons. “We prefer not to have to customize for specific carriers simply because it takes more time. We would like there to be more consistency across our products.” Which is great to hear, because the Verizon G2 looks like a totally different smartphone compared to the other G2 variants out there.