LG Shifts Strategy, Will No Longer Release Yearly Handset Updates

For years now, the phone industry has pursued a strategy of pushing regular yearly updates to device families. While this keeps new phones in the hands of the upgrade-obsessed, it doesn’t align particularly well with how people upgrade devices. In the old contract world, most people bought every two years, and 18-24 months still seems to be typical for many people. LG has announced that its stepping away from the yearly update cycle to focus more on updating when updates are called for.

“We will unveil new smartphones when it is needed. But we will not launch it just because other rivals do,” said LG Electronics Vice Chairman Cho Sung-jin on Wednesday during a press conference at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, according to the Korea Herald.

“We plan to retain existing models longer by, for instance, unveiling more variant models of the G series or V series,” Cho said.

When pushed to give additional color on his answer, Cho responded by saying: “We found it is important to retain a good platform for a long (time) and concerns rise over the supply of lithium materials.”

That last line is a head-scratcher. The only lithium used in smartphone construction, to the best of our knowledge, is in the battery. Every smartphone has a battery, and although midrange phones might have smaller batteries than large phones, that’s just not much of a reduction in lithium usage.

The rest of the report is putting a brave face on a bad situation. LG’s smartphone division has been losing money for 11 quarters. It’s dragging down the company’s overall performance, and while the mobile division has made some progress in stemming the tide of red ink, it’s still not been enough to push the division back into the black.

On paper, slashing yearly phone development cycles makes a lot of sense. Carriers have to do a lot of their own testing before approving a device, which means there’s a team of people at LG, Samsung, and Apple who are more-or-less in sprint mode from Day 1. By the time a flagship launches, you’ve got to have its successor already well into development. Launching fewer platforms with more variants may also reduce the need to test devices for OS upgrades.

LG’s biggest enemy here isn’t going to be Apple or Samsung, but consumer expectations. People expect to see refreshed handsets every 12 months. Phone stores do as well. Not delivering those updates is going to make LG look bad, even if the company has made a smart financial move and put more time into improving its flagship designs. There’s no objective reason it should harm the company given typical replacement cycles for smartphones, but perception and reality often have a tenuous relationship with one another.

Given that Samsung and Apple (mostly Apple) capture virtually all (or all) the profit in the mobile ecosystem, it’s not clear why LG hasn’t thrown in the towel already.

Continue reading

Unreleased Nintendo Game Boy Keyboard Brought Back to Life

Gaming history YouTuber Liam Robertson has gotten his hands on a Work Boy — possibly the last one in the world, and it's working thanks to that giant Nintendo data leak from a few months back.

Cyberpunked 2077: CDPR ‘Apologizes’ For Releasing Broken Game, Offers Refunds

Cyberpunk 2077's PS4 and Xbox One S version is so bad, the company is now offering refunds. We recommend last-gen console gamers take them up on it, rather than waiting.

Google Releases First Android 12 Developer Preview

The first developer preview is available today, and you can take a peek at the new OS if you've got a recent Pixel phone. Be warned: this is a very early build that you should not use on your main phone.

NASA Releases Incredible Perseverance Rover Landing Video

NASA's Perseverance rover has been on the surface of Mars for several days, giving the team here on Earth time to run system checks and download preliminary data from the robot. The agency has now released the first large batch of media from the mission, including hundreds of still images and the first video and audio ever recorded on Mars.