Rumor has it LG could shutter its phone division, which would end a legacy of experimentation bringing new and strange designs to the market. Here’s the innovations to remember.
Get ready to pour one out: rumor has it that LG will finally announce that it’s leaving the phones business entirely in the coming days. It’s no secret that the company’s smartphone sales haven’t been stellar in recent years, but if it does pull the plug, we’ll lose out on a phonemaker has continued to push the form and function of today’s handsets. Granted, few of LG’s experiments have made a big impact on the phones industry: its most exciting designs just seemed to prove how intractable the ‘black rectangle’ standard for smartphones has become. The market has proven that consumers will largely buy phones in a single format that’s been honed to a high finish in the better part of the last decade; any new designs are held to that standard, and their deviation is held against them. Then again, LG”s more exciting models simply haven’t delivered the polish that consumers have come to expect. The swing-out design of the LG Wing 5G and dual screen of the LG V60 and LG G8X have been novel, but it’s tougher to wrangle apps on their extra displays than it is on leading single-screen iOS and Android phones. LG’s spent a lot longer experimenting with new features, some on their main phone series. The LG G5 featured modules that let you swap out the phone’s endcap for a camera grip or 360 camera (like Moto Mods, but switching out parts of the actual handset), while the more recent LG V50 had aerial gesture control that recognized hand motions by supposedly tracking your veins.
