The brand new flagship smartphone from Korean manufacturer LG, the G4 has gone on sale at UK-based retailer Carphone Warehouse. The phone was listed for preorder on the website earlier this month with various tariff schemes starting from £35 a month without any down payment on Vodafone, with a two-year contract. There are also various schemes on offer from two other carriers, O2 and EE. The retailer is carrying two leather clad options, including a brown version and an exclusive black version. There is also a grey plastic version available for purchase on the website.
LG is currently ranked fifth worldwide in terms of smartphone shipments with a 4.6% market share. While the last generation flagship from the company, the G3 is reported to have sold around 10 million units worldwide, the President and CEO of LG Electronics, Mr. Juno Cho has expressed confidence that the company will be able to sell more than 12 million units of the G4 overall. Mr. Cho has also revealed that the company is planning to increase its marketing spend by as much as 60% this year, although, he refused to get into any details.
The LG G4 features a curved 5.5 inch Quad HD (2560 x 1440) display. The device is powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 808 hexa-core SoC and comes with 3 GB LPDDR4 RAM and 32 GB built-in storage, which is further expandable by up to 128 GB via a microSD card. The rear camera on the device has a 16-megapixel sensor, and comes with Optical Image Stabilization (OIS), Laser Auto-Focus and an f/1.8 aperture. Initial reviews of the camera also seem to be fairly complimentary to the Korean consumer electronics manufacturer. The front camera has a large 8 megapixel sensor, capable of recoding 1080p Full HD videos at 30 fps. The battery is removable and is rated at 3,000 mAh. Connectivity options include WI-FI 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac, Bluetooth 4.0, NFC and Cat.6 LTE. The phone also comes equipped with an IR blaster, which allows the user to use the device as a remote control, with a simple app downloaded from the Google Play Store. The LG G4 comes with Android 5.1 Lollipop out of the box, with LG’s proprietary Optimus UI on top.