LG at MWC: what’s new?

[MWC] At Mobile World Conrgess, “everything changes this year” says LG. The company, which had been lagging in the smartphone game has been making a remarkable come back in the previous few months with a portfolio of powerful products. Is LG “creating a new beginning” at Mobile World Congress? LG defines the future of mobile devices with four trends. 1/Multicore  2/ Display 3/ 3D Mobile 4/ “True Tablet War”. Let’s go over each point, see what LG has been pitching and I’ll give you my own take.

1/Multicore

LG Optimus 3D: a dual-core, dual-channel smartphone. What the heck does this mean? Well, dual-core is probably understood by most: it means that you have two processing cores. Dual-channels refers to the idea that the memory can be accessed by two channels (or conduits, if you want) so that there are less conflicts (or wait time) when each core accesses the memory. This is a technique widely used on PCs, so it’s a natural evolution of the smartphones.

What’s the performance boost? It depends on whether or not memory conflicts were holding back in a single-channel configuration – we’ll have to measure this, but this has been proven to be useful in general. Texas Instrument (Ti) is the chip provider here.

2/ Display

Bizarrely, LG didn’t say all that much here, but their display technology is leading edge and right now LG is the only display company that can truly challenge Samsung. Their IPS LCD provides top, high-resolution, image quality at reasonable power consumption – what more to ask?  In my personal view, this is one of LG’s greatest strengths.

3/ 3D for Mobile

This part is in, my opinion, pure marketing. Consumers are not *that* interested by snapping 3D photos and creating 3D content in general. It might be that it’s simply difficult to figure out which 3D files will work on which devices. At this point, LG probably feels that it can have a technological edge with 3D (thanks to their glasses-less mobile display) and tries to push it, but “3D” hardly qualifies as a “must-have” – at least not for the next few years. The whole 3D eco-system is still too complicated to reach mark market readiness.

LG believes that by enabling users to record their own 3D content, this will create a virtuous circle in which content is available, therefore users will want to consume it, making them get a proper setup. They are then ready to create/consume even more 3D – that’s a manufacturer’s dream, but reality will hit at some point. In the meantime, LG is spending precious resources and handset internal volume to promote 3D.

The immediate price to pay for being 3D-ready, is to have bulkier phones as they contain two lenses (2-lens is not mandatory, but that’s how LG does it now).

4/ “True Tablet War”

LG considers Tablets to be a real category that is here to stay, so it wants in – big time. The LG Optimus Pad is LG’s champion in that market. LG pokes Samsung and Apple about their Galaxy Tab (too small) and iPad (too heavy) products. LG of course lands right in the middle with a 8.9” intermediate size. LG is defines the qualities of its tablet as follow: /Performance /Advanced Multimedia /Portability.

Using Android 3.0, the LG Optimus Pad seems a bit different from next-gen competitors, but is it so different? Yes – but in the details. Most of the experience should be similar, but you can capture 3D photos, use an HDMI output etc…  On the design side, LG firmly believes that its 8.9” format provides the best ergonomics when it comes to typing text. Interestingly, the LG tablet is heavier than the bigger Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1.

The new format does seem interesting, and we’ll have to get our hands on it to see how well it really works.

Conclusion

LG has become an important player in the Android world, almost overnight. Thanks to 3^rd-party powerful chips like Tegra 2 and OMAP, LG can go head-to-head with Samsung in terms of performance – at the cost of having to pay a little extra to its suppliers, a price that is well worth it. LG’s display technology should remain a great differentiator and LG should definitely work on software and services for its users – that’s the next frontier and Samsung has a head start already.

Hubert Nguyen
Categories: Cellphones, Tablets, Top Stories
Tags: LG, MWC