LG isn’t just a company that releases their best devices in the West and South Korea, Japan has become an important market for them over the past couple of years and while they’re probably not as big a name over there as say Samsung or Sony are, LG are definitely making inroads into the Japanese smartphone market. In fact, it was the LG Isai that launched in Japan earlier this year that basically told us everything we needed to know about the G3. The Isai is LG’s version of the G3 for the Japanese market and on the inside things are mostly the same, but now it’s been upgraded with a couple of new key specs.
The Isai is getting upgraded with 3GB of RAM and VoLTE, or Voice over LTE, on Japan’s au by KDDI network and while there were variants of the G3 with 3GB of RAM here in the West it looks like this is to be the new de facto version, at least on au by KDDI anyway. What’s special about this new upgraded Isai is the inclusion of VoLTE, which is something relatively new to the Japanese market and it’s nice to see someone like LG getting ready for the new technology before anyone else. The new model isn’t on sale just yet but should be shortly. There’s a chance that LG will be bringing a VoLTE-capable device to the West, I’m fairly certain that they would just release software updates to carriers that support it. In Japan, there are releases of smartphones in the Spring and in the Autumn on the major networks so this feels more like a refresh than anything else to me.
It is however, good to see a name like LG doing well in Japan, after all the Japanese smartphone market is a lucrative one and while Sony is currently doing well on their home turf, it’d certainly be interesting to see LG challenge Sony for the top spot and offering features like Voice over LTE could be one way to do just that.