LG is one of the few big-name manufacturers that usually focuses on lower-end devices more than higher-end ones over the course of a year, announcing four new mid-range and low-end devices earlier this year, and the flagship of focus, the G4. Now, in past years, the South Korean company has released much in the same way Samsung has, with an early-in-the-year flagship and a later-in-the-year flagship, with the two families of devices being the G Pro and the G, respectively. The last G Pro device we saw was the G Pro 2 and, though it never made it to U.S. shores, it still garnered sales and popularity in Europe and Asia where the device was officially launched after its early 2014 launch. LG looks to be maintaining this two-per-year model for 2015, but with what?
This year, as mentioned, we’ve seen LG welcome the lower-end market to Android 5.0 Lollipop, the ‘sweetest version yet’, according to Google at its launch last fall, and we’ve also see LG launch the G Flex 2, the first phone to feature the Snapdragon 810 and its perhaps-nonexistent overheating issues, as well as the recently announced and still-launching G4, the first phone to feature the Snapdragon 808. It’s a little over halfway through May at this point, so LG has time, and lots of it. And that’s a good thing.
According to Focus Taiwan, Eason Shao, the director of the mobile business unit of LG’s Taiwan branch, has high hopes for both the G4 and the still-coming flagship for the latter half of the year. What Shao is also quoted as marking is that the hardware and specifications of this device have yet to be finalized. The plan to continue the two-per-year model appear to come from the expectations by LG that the Taiwanese consumer-base will be opting to replace their devices in greater numbers than last year, choosing either the G4 or this upcoming device.
What we know of the G4, with its still-impressive Snapdragon 808 64-bit hexa-core processor, improved 16 megapixel back camera, brightened f1.8 aperture 8 megapixel front camera, as well as the still-removable back, battery and external storage, on top of the continually evolving quantum dot and QuadHD display technologies, proves to make a remarkable flagship for 2015. And for LG to improve on the G line, which many have treated as the ‘true flagship’ device of LG since the days of the G2 because the G Pro line doesn’t see a global release regularly, is quite the statement.
But as the technologies improve and appear, so will newer devices with them inside. LG has said that the device will see an announcement in the second half of this year, and that means that we start playing the waiting game on what new processors come out, as well as considering which markets globally LG would both be likely to and benefit from launch a second flagship in.