LG is getting out of the smartphone business and that’s probably a smart move for a company that’s been losing money in that space for the past six years. But it’s still sad to see the exit of a company that had been pushing the boundaries of smartphone weirdness with models like the dual-screen LG Wing, modular LG G5, secondary screen LG V10, and the LG Rollable which will now sadly never see the light of day.

If there had actually been much demand for any of those far-out designs, maybe LG wouldn’t be closing its mobile phone business. But the bigger problem is that the smartphone space is increasingly competitive… and increasingly dominated by a handful of companies that aren’t LG. So the more traditional budget, mid-range, and flagship phones the company cranked out didn’t make much money for LG either.

But it’s worth remembering that not only did LG put out a number of nondescript phones and some truly strange designs over the years. It also was one of the first to adopt features that later became normal like slim bezels, ultra-wide (or tall) displays, and even capacitive touch displays.

LG Wing

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2 replies on “Lilbits: Remembering LG’s innovative phones, another smartphone Linux distro, and high-performance single-board computers”

  1. As a frequent critic of LG, I’ll admit that some of their ideas for smartphones were neat, but I just wasn’t willing to buy them based on the way that LG implemented the idea.

    Every time I thought one of LG’s ideas was neat, there was some glaring flaw or compromise with the device overall. Each time I just told myself “this is cool, but I’m going to wait for someone to implement this idea in a better way”.

    Like the modular LG G5. It was a cool idea, but the fact that you actually need to open a cavity of the phone’s chassis to swap the removable section was just a horrible implementation of that idea. The phone’s body just had this disgusting gaping seam that made the phone feel like it wasn’t assembled correctly. A friend of mine had a G5 and he always complained that the seam would get packed with pocket lint.

    Then a few months later, Motorola did it properly with their Moto Z series, and their “Motomods”. They simply interface with the outside of the phone. Brilliant.

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