Do you like speed? Then you’ll love LG. Speed is in the spotlight for LG’s Mobile World Congress preview event as you can see with the photo above. LTE, along with smartphone after smartphone. It’s all on the menu for LG, who believes this focus will help drive sales of its mobile devices.
LG’s product lineup for Mobile World Congress, announced throughout last week, illustrates increasing use of high-end components. Nvidia’s Tegra 3 quad-core chips, high-resolution and 3D displays, better battery life, an embrace of the latest Ice Cream Sandwich version of Android, and the ability to tap into super-fast 4G LTE networks are all here.
The devices using these technologies, on hand at the preview event, were the Optimus 4X HD, which includes the Tegra 3 chip and HD display, and the Optimus 3D Max. There was also the 5-inch tablet-phone Optimus Vu, along with a number of affordable style-centric phones under its L series of devices.
“We lost our focus,” Ramchan Woo, who runs the smartphone division for LG, acknowledged in a discussion with CNET. “We’re going back to the fundamentals.”
Once dominant in the mobile phone market, LG has struggled to see success with smartphones. However, rivals such as HTC, Motorola Mobility, and Samsung Electronics have released a number of blockbuster Android phones. LG is hoping this new focus will put them back in the game.
And it just may. Despite the lack of enthusiasm from consumers and carriers in the past, Woo says there is more excitement this year because of LG’s more competitive product lineup. LG had also experienced a much better fourth quarter thanks to the release of 3D and LTE devices last year, though executives have cautioned the strength may have been due to holiday sales.
“LG will leverage LTE speed and quad core processing, two of the hottest trends in 2012,” said Danny Hernandez-Ortega, director of marketing in Europe for LG.
LG isn’t planning on spending a massive amount on marketing, so the phones will in effect have to sell themselves, Woo noted.
LG, meanwhile, isn’t completely abandoning its mass-market strategy, which the company is addressing with its aforementioned L series of phones. The devices will be priced competitively, but Woo said competing devices in this segment wouldn’t match what LG packs in its devices. No other mass-market device will have the same big screen, thin profile, battery life or internal specs as the L phones, he said, adding that most of the carriers around the world have committed to selling it.
LG is looking to reinvigorate themselves in the market, and if these plans are any indication, they may yet be able to pull it off. As far as the LG Optimus 4X HD goes, it’s one of the phones we’re drooling figuratively over this year, and we can hardly wait to unlock this baby and try it on Tru SIM!
Photo: Robert Cheng, CNET