LG Mobile Communications

» see lg.com/mobile as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

lg mobile was the phone brand you got when you were samsung-adjacent but did not want to be samsung. the chocolate in 2006 was the moment lg felt like the phone with the best hardware taste on the shelf. the g-series carried that through the android years. by the end there was the velvet and the wing, the wing being that extraordinary two-screen swivel phone that opened sideways like a t. the wing existed for about four months of retail before lg announced it was leaving the phone business entirely.

the announcement came on 5 april 2021, from lg's board of directors in seoul. the reasoning was blunt: the smartphone market had consolidated around apple and samsung, chinese vendors owned the volume tier, and lg's mobile division had posted losses in every quarter for close to six years running. the total cumulative loss was reported at roughly $4.5 billion. the wind-down completed on 31 july 2021. lg said it would keep servicing existing phones for a while, region by region, and pivot its resources to electric vehicle components and smart home platforms.

in turkey lg phones were on the shelf but never at the front of it. samsung dominated the korean-brand slot, and lg sat behind it as the second choice you considered and then did not pick. i had lg televisions in my life for years. i never owned an lg phone. by the time i would have looked at one seriously, the wing was already the reason to look and by then the whole division was on its way out.

~ the dossier ~

~ the run ~

lg entered the phone business as lg information & communications in 1995, formed out of the older goldstar telecommunications lineage. the chocolate phone in 2006 was the first product that made lg feel like a design brand. black slab, red backlit touch keys, one of the last hit feature phones before the iphone reset the category. lg rode that momentum through the early android years with the g-series and the v-series, both of which had loyal audiences among people who wanted big screens and audiophile-grade audio in a phone before that was standard everywhere.

the modular g5 in 2016 was the last big swing that mattered. it was the phone with a chin that popped off so you could slot in a camera grip or a hi-fi audio module. it did not work, commercially or mechanically. after that lg's phones kept getting reviewed as "good hardware, weird choices" while the market moved to whichever of samsung and apple you already owned.

~ what got buried ~

the wing is the artifact that will keep getting written about. a phone whose main screen rotated ninety degrees to reveal a smaller second screen underneath, meant for a driving app plus a video, or a chat plus a map. it was strange in the way lg phones had been strange for a decade by then. it launched in late 2020 and was already a curio by early 2021 when the board decision came down. the modular g5, the rollable prototype that was demoed at ces 2021 and then quietly killed, the wing, all in the same closing chapter.

lg still exists, and still sells televisions, appliances and screens. the mobile division is the piece that got amputated. it is the reason there are used lg phones on marketplaces with no software updates and no manufacturer left to write to. the third korean phone brand went away and left a slightly emptier shelf.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »