Originally published at: Say farewell to LG's occasionally wonderful smartphones | Boing Boing
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We have an LG TV, and I recently read that they’ve exited the market of DVD players as well. We still have a bunch of DVDs and were going to buy a matching player so there’s be one remote to rule them all. May have to dig deeper.
So with them gone, and my hate-on for Samsung, it doesn’t leave much. Hell-lo again, Motorola!
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LG made the best Google Nexus phones IMO.
It’s still one of the largest conglomerates in South Korea, representing a few percent of the country’s entire GDP, so they’re doing all right.
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My Nexus 5X was great until it got stuck in an unrecoverable boot loop.
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The hardware business is hard to compete in unless you either just sell a bunch of bad phones on thin margins or a few good phones with high margins and brand recognition to keep it up. There doesn’t seem to be much of an inbetween. I know OnePlus was kind of like that but they’ve really gone towards high end with their phones more these days, unfortunately.
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Over the years when it was time to get a new phone I’d consider getting an LG and look at the reviews. The main outcome of that exercise was to reach the conclusion that models were wildly uneven in terms of quality and feature from generation to generation. I’ll bet that the smartphone division’s management was a high-turnover mess and that LG finally decided the culture was too dysfunctional to fix.
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A few weeks ago, I noticed that Verizon no longer offers LG branded basic phones and now have a couple of flip phones from brands I’ve never heard of. I guess I’ll have to baby my LG Revere 2.
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Yeah, my last couple phones are LG and I really enjoyed them. I just bought a V60 because the V50 has such mixed reviews.
I will miss the great DAC in a couple years when this one finally gives up. My G8 was still going strong after a couple years except for the camera; it decided to quit focusing.
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I loved my two LG phone (NV, and…?) that flipped open to have a full teeny physical keyboard. They were true gems. I imagine pivoting into the touch-screen era has to have been a brutal and risky upgrade to production and design.
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I really like my G7. LG seemed to make good hardware at not an astronomical price. I mean $500 was high enough, but I’m really not going to want to shell out +$800 for a Samsung.
-The crux with the G7 was less the phone and more the issue that Verizon will only allow current generation non-contract phones on their network. A G6 would physically work, but they won’t let you activate it. At this point I doubt they would like you activate the G7 since the G8 replaced it.
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There is a mid-range market, and I think LG was, for the most part, a middle-of-the-road brand. The problem is that cheaper Chinese brands have become competitive in that segment, and LG never had the brand strength to compete against identical phones from Huawei.
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Such a shame that they’ve decided to exit the market, while i know that their phones weren’t necessarily top tier like Apple and Samsung i do know that they were liked well enough to be a relatively trusted brand. Probably it wasn’t worth competing if they were not going to be able to sell a lot of units, but one less manufacturer is going to drive down competition which i see as a bad thing.
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I’d suggest giving OnePlus a look. They’ve been hitting it out of the park on mid-range and flagship (sorta) handsets, these past few years.
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Almost al my pines have been LG due to the DAC, I listen to a lot of music via wired headphones and the sound is great. The phones have been what I wanted and were at good prices. Going to be annoyed when my curent one goes.
I get a long life out of mine as I do not need the latest and greatest hot banana phone but even so there’s an end down the road to this one.
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Currently i’m dreading having to buy a new phone in the near future (whenever that ends up being). I have a Galaxy S10, and apparently it’s the last of the Galaxy phones to have a headphone jack and a mini SD card slot. I’m hoping Samsung will change their mind about phasing out both but i seriously doubt it, i might actually jump ship from their phones in 1-2 years from now. No idea what i might end up getting, guess we’ll see.
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Get a 10$ USB-C to minijack headphone dongle from Apple and whatever phone you like.
Yeah i figured that going forward i will need to get an adapter for the headphones, but removing the SD card slot is a much bigger pain in the ass for me as that’s a feature i definitely would like to retain.
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Chinese brands have both. I know you can’t really use Huawei these days due to US government interference but Xiaomi offer plenty of bang for your buck.
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Android never really did a good job handling SD storage.
I just got a Nokia 6.1 plus. SD card (or 2nd sim, up to you,) headphone jack, bloat-free android. It’s actually pretty nice.
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