The new LG G6 is right around the corner. Here are five things you can expect to see on LG's latest flagship.
Over the past few years, LG’s had a hit and miss record with their smartphones. When the LG G3 first came around, we were really blown away with its Quad HD display, its amazing design even though it was built with plastic. But overall, it was a very successful device. And then the LG G4 came along, not quite as successful but definitely an interesting push. It kind of blended in some of the G Flex line with the LG G4. And then last year, the LG G5 was really a humongous push in a very different direction. The LG G5 was the first widely available modular device with something called Friends, which basically were modules you could plug into your phone. You could change your battery that way and it was a very interesting way. But the LG G4 and G5 weren’t exactly as successful as the G3.
And now with 2017 and Mobile World Congress is only a few weeks away, the LG G6 is almost here. So here are five things you can expect to see on the brand new LG G6 and hopefully see LG come back to its domain of being a fantastic smartphone producer once again.
Display
The first thing I want to talk about is the all new display found on the LG G6 or so far is rumored to be found on the LG G6. It’s a new 5.7-inch (up from 5.3 on the G5). It’s different in resolution, from Quad HD to QHD Plus, something they’re calling under the display technology but it has less energy, more color saturation and all the same marketing stuff. But the cool thing is it has a completely different resolution of 2840x1440. If you recall the normal Quad HD resolution’s was 2560x1440, a lot of PC resolution and monitors have those resolutions. This actually gives you an 18x9 or if you work by cinema space, a 2:1 ratio; which means it’s twice as wide as it is tall giving it a very interesting screen ratio that will give you some black barring whenever you’re watching 16x9 video. It isn’t exactly a 2:1 but more of a 1.84:1 ratio when it comes to watching TV or movies on your display. It’s definitely going to be interesting to see this video display in action and how it looks and see what the benefits are of having a 2:1 display. It might be very cool for multitasking when you’re in landscape mode. Having two square windows right available for you.
Bezels
The second thing I want to talk about is regarding the display but it’s actually the area around the display commonly known as the bezel. The LG G6 is rumored to have a 90% screen to bezel ratio, which gives it very razor thin bezels; which lets you really get immersed in your content on your phone. The thing with bezels are they’re very unattractive. If you look at the LG G5 and the UltraFine displays on the Mac, you see those humongous bezels on the chin that it has. It just doesn’t look as pleasing. The monitor I have right behind me right here, also an LG monitor. But you can see, the bezels are quite small and it looks very attractive. Same principle comes with TVs. The less bezel there is, the more attractive it appears to us as human beings. So when we see a G6 device with no bezels, it really does look awesome to our eyes.
Design
The third thing I want to talk about is an all new design. The LG G3 and G4 were built primarily with plastic and some kind of weird materials here and there with leather on the G4. The G5 has been built with aluminum but it wasn’t quite unibody because it came apart on the bottom. Well, the G6 is apparently going to have either a glass or metal construction. It’s metal is highly finished like the iPhone 7 with a Jet Black coating. Or if it’s glass, then you can probably tell that it’s going to be a very different approach on the design and the build quality. But if the G6 is actually made of glass, then it’s definitely going to feel very interesting but yet familiar because it might feel almost exactly the same in the hands as the S7 and S7 edge.
Processor
Number four is going to be the processor inside the G6. I’m talking about the lack of the Snapdragon 835 processor mainly because of Samsung hogging all the S35, 835 chips from Snapdragon for their S8 and S8 edge. So we may not see the Snapdragon 835 processor. We’re more likely going to see the 821, which has a lot of power. It’s available on the Google Pixel and XL but it’s definitely not the industry leading chip available at the time, which is going to be a pretty big disappointment so I’m going to see how LG words their marketing to gloss over the fact that it doesn’t have the latest Snapdragon processor.
Friends
The last thing I want to talk about is ditching the Friends feature on the LG G5 on the G6. If you can recall, Friends was this whole modularity thing that they were pushing in terms of switching out modules to add in camera modules. Basically, having a modular phone (which really wasn’t modular), it was basically a mess of a storm there. I never saw anyone actually go and buy these things personally from the people that I know that have G5s. so I think the G6 is just going to be a typical, standard smartphone. It’s going to have a lot of great features like dual cameras and all that kind of stuff. It’s just going to ditch all that unnecessary things that people just never use.
So the LG G6 is definitely going to be a very interesting device in my opinion. I can’t wait to see it debut in MWC.