LG officially unveiled its first set of ‘K’-series smartphones last January at the CES 2016 trade show in Las Vegas, Nevada. While the K7 and K10 were the only devices in the lineup that were shown off back then, the South Korean consumer electronics company has, since then, introduced other K-series models as well, like the K4, the K5 and the K8, and some of these mid-range and entry-level devices are already available for purchase in some strategic markets around the world. The devices replace the erstwhile ‘L’-series smartphones from LG, which had failed to gain the sort of traction in the global smartphone market that the company would have ideally wanted them to.
The K-series is positioned squarely in the mid-range and entry-level segments of the smartphone market, so one wouldn’t expect to see high-end Snapdragon 820 chips in any of the devices in the lineup. That being the case, LG’s ‘K’ devices are either powered by MediaTek’s MT6735M chipsets like in the case of the LG K4, or by Qualcomm’s MSM8909 Snapdragon 210 SoCs like in the case of the LTE variant of the LG K7. The best that a K series device has to offer by way of processing power is the Snapdragon 410 that comes under the hood in the LG K10, but that too, only in some markets.
Now, two more of LG’s K-series devices have been spotted on the Geekbench database with model names LG-K530 and LG-K535. Both devices run Android 6.0.1 Marshmallow and are seemingly powered by the Snapdragon 430 MSM8937 SoC. However, while the K530 will come with just the 2 GB of RAM, the K535 is listed with 3 GB. Meanwhile, there’s one area that’s not quite adding up. While the Snapdragon 430 comes with a maximum clock speed of 1.2 GHz, Geekbench seems to indicate a 1.4 GHz frequency for the K530 CPU while completely failing to detect the clock-speed of the K535 processor. That higher clock-speed listed for the K530 has now led to some media speculation on whether the SoC under the hood of that model is the Snapdragon 435 instead. However, with nothing definitive to go on that front right now, we’ll simply have to wait till we get more information on the upcoming handsets.
