Major original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) will both collaborate and compete with one another in the second half of the year, industry sources said on Monday, adding that the likes of Samsung Electronics, Google, LG Electronics, and Apple will be reliant on their competitors as much as they’ll be looking to beat them. According to the latest report from South Korea, LG will be manufacturing at least one of the two members of the upcoming Pixel 2 lineup that the Alphabet-owned company is expected to introduce in early fall. The Mountain View, California-based tech giant enlisted the help of HTC for the original Pixel series but is now reportedly looking to split the manufacturing burden between the Taiwanese phone maker and LG Electronics, insiders previously claimed.
The Seoul-based consumer electronics manufacturer already has a long working history with Google, having previously manufactured the Nexus 4, Nexus 5, and the Nexus 5X for the company. Google was reportedly eyeing a major investment in LG’s mobile OLED business earlier this year but it’s still unclear whether the firm ultimately decided to went through with that idea. Whereas LG will be helping Google on the hardware front, the company will turn to its partner for assistance in regards to mobile software, as the Google Assistant is expected to be pre-installed on the upcoming LG V30, sources close to the firm claim. Likewise, the LG V30 will reportedly ship with support for Google’s virtual reality (VR) platform Daydream that’s also expected to roll out to the Galaxy S8 lineup in the coming weeks. It’s currently unclear whether the upcoming Galaxy Note 8 will support Daydream out of the box, though that particular model is at least said to ship with the Google Assistant in addition to featuring Samsung’s proprietary Bixby companion.
Samsung is simultaneously looking to supply certain components for the iPhone 8 series to Apple, and this interconnected state of affairs in the mobile industry has a realistic chance of negatively affecting innovation, some industry watchers speculate, adding how most of the major OEMs are slowly becoming too dependent on each other and are hence not putting a large focus on major technological advancements.