LG to launch a smartphone that "stands above the G series"

Now that the Samsung Galaxy S6 and HTC One M9 have both officially been unveiled, everyone is setting their sights on LG’s next big smartphone. With the rumored launch of the LG G4 set for mid-April, one could assume that the company’s next flagship will be a worthy competitor to the S6 and M9. But according to LG, that’s not all they have up their sleeve for 2015.

According to Juno Cho, CEO of LG Mobile, the company plans to release a smartphone with higher-end specifications than the popular G series. At MWC 2015, Cho explains:

We are planning to release a product that stands above the G series. It will be launched during the second half of this year.

The LG exec didn’t reveal any specifics when it comes to the new high-end flagship line, but since last year’s G3 already featured great specifications, it’s difficult to speculate as to what the company could improve. LG has made some great advancements in the flexible display world, so perhaps the company is planning on truly bringing their flexible display tech into the mainstream. LG’s most recent high-end device, the G Flex 2, featured a 5.5-inch P-OLED display that we really enjoyed. But the device’s battery life, camera quality and a handful of other factors ended up tarnishing our overall experience with the device.

Of course, LG could also be working on something to compete with Samsung’s Galaxy Note line. Back in December, LG filed a trademark for something called the “G Pen”, or what’s purported to be a smart stylus, much like Samsung’s S Pen. So perhaps this new mystery device that LG is building could better take on the Samsung’s Note line in a way that the G Pro series never could. This is all speculation for now, so we’ll have to see what LG comes up with later this year.

Cho also commented on the company’s in-house built processors that we may see rolling out to more LG devices sometime soon. As we reported earlier, LG announced last year that they would begin building their own chipsets, and that production was slated to start in Q2 of 2014. In turn, LG rolled out their first chipset in the LG G3 Screen, which debuted in October 2014. The processor in the Screen is called the Nuclun (pronounced NOO-klun), and features a big.LITTLE octa-core design with four 1.5GHz Cortex-A15 cores for high-performance tasks and four 1.2GHz Cortex-A7 cores for less intensive processing.

At MWC, Cho commented further on the importance of building their own chipsets:

Producing our own mobile application chips is very important. As LG Electronics has been consistent in developing these, we plan to gradually incorporate into our new models… We do have a lot of issues that need to be addressed, but second- and third-generation processors will be much better.

LG has historically used Qualcomm chipsets in the majority of their handsets, and it’s obvious why they’d want to move away from that. Samsung has used their in-house built Exynos processors in many of their devices, and even Apple has developed their own mobile processors. In order for LG to regain its spot as the third largest smartphone manufacturer in the world, using their own processors could potentially help that happen.

Even after the recent announcement of two of the biggest smartphones of the year, Cho remains confident in LG’s success with their upcoming smartphones:

Samsung did a very good job with the Galaxy S6 smartphone. I believe our G4 will also be good. With higher expectations, LG put huge resources into the LG G4.

It remains to be seen whether or not LG will use a new iteration of the Nuclun processor in their upcoming handsets, but we do know that they’re working hard to bring more of their own to market.