The end of LG’s 20-year mobile phone business in the US is the true end of an era. We’ll be creatively poorer for it.
I have a strong affection for LG. Some of the first photos of my daughter were taken with the boxy, powerful LG VX8000, a redoubtable flip phone for Verizon. Since then, I’ve always admired how LG is willing to take a chance, throw a wink, or crack a smile.
LG originally came to the fore in the US because, like Samsung, it decided to make a big bet on Qualcomm’s CDMA technology. That made it a major supplier for Verizon, Sprint, and their predecessors (the likes of Alltel and Western Wireless).
CDMA created a sort of walled garden in the US and parts of Asia where different manufacturers flourished compared to the rest of the world. LG, Samsung, Sanyo, and Motorola were stronger here than they were globally; Nokia and Ericsson didn’t want to play much in CDMA and thus weren’t as big a deal in the US as in the rest of the world. The Chinese phone-makers who dominate global sales figures today weren’t on the charts at all.
LG’s phones were always marked by a bit of whimsy and a willingness to take chances. It’s a mega-corporation just like Samsung, but there was always an appealing “we’re number two, so we try harder” feeling coming from LG, much like with ZTE compared to Huawei. And no question, it could get downright quirky.
Top hits include the LG Chocolate’s iPod-like control wheel; the G2’s “knock code,” where you unlock your screen with your knuckles; the G5’s failed attempt at modularity; the Stylo series’ stylus support on the cheap; and the Wing’s swiveling T-shaped screen.
The company never met an OS it wouldn’t try, producing the Moblin-powered LG GW990, the Firefox-powered LG Fireweb, and a bunch of Windows phones. Some of them never even made it to US shelves.
(LG’s creativity also inspired ours, in the form of the one of the best phone reviews ever written for PCMag.com: Jamie Lendino’s 2011 review of the LG Genesis, which incorporated a plethora of references to songs by the band Genesis.)
That spirit of adventure hid a constantly swerving strategy and a lack of discipline that prevented LG from delivering on focused flagships the way Samsung and Huawei did. While its rivals consistently improved features and reliability, LG pinballed all over the place with as many misses as hits.
By the second half of the 2010s, LG’s market share in the US was largely based on an array of reliable, stolid, and affordable midrange phones that padded out the lower ends of carriers’ lineups: devices such as the X Charge, the Stylo series, and the Tribute series. Outside the US, those phones couldn’t compete with shinier low-cost models coming from the likes of Xiaomi and Huawei. In the US, they were eventually undercut by Samsung’s A-series and TCL.
When I went to Shenzhen in 2018 and visited a shopping mall floor that consisted entirely of phone cases, I couldn’t find a case for an LG phone. It was like they already didn’t exist. And now LG has officially retired from the business.
This isn’t a list of LG’s greatest phones. Those would include the stylish Prada, the musical Chocolate, the solid VX8000, and the camera-focused V20. Instead, I’m saluting the creativity that didn’t quite hit the mark. And I’m leaving out a few really weird foreign models, like the the see-through LG Fx0. LG has made a lot of phones.
These 10 phones all actually hit the US market. They didn’t succeed, but they took some impressive chances. Respect.
In the early 2000s, there was a brief fad of limited-access phones for small children or the elderly. LG’s entry was by far the most adorable: It looked like Shrek. None of phones in this category, including the Migo, the Firefly, and the TicTalk, got any traction.
The swivel-screen LG Wing was preceded by LG’s MediaFLO broadcast TV phone, the VX9400. The VX9400 got a dozen or so channels of linear TV being broadcast over frequencies now used for 4G. I tested it in Richmond, VA, and bruised my chest walking into a parking meter while watching Jon Stewart on The Daily Show. Few people subscribed to the service.
Well, it was certainly square. I can’t disentangle the Lotus from its marketing campaign, which sold it as a “ladies’ phone” with an attempt at strong fashion appeal. In general, these “ladies’ phones” haven’t done well in the market, as women appear to prefer phones that don’t aggressively shout “ladies only.”
The LG Expo was a Windows Mobile 6.5 phone with an add-on projector for business presentations. This is a trick that both Samsung and Motorola have also tried over time. It always fails. LG doubled down on a commitment to Windows Phone 7 later in 2010, but the OS failed when Android took off; LG abandoned its Windows Phone line in 2012.
The year 2011 was marked by a global delusion that 3D was the next big thing. LG, always one to try whatever, developed the first mass-market 3D phone, the Optimus 3D, which became the LG Thrill 4G in the US. The Thrill 4G was also notable for not actually being 4G. The 3D fad faded within a couple of years.
It was a slider phone…with a second, 2-inch touchscreen between the halves of the keyboard. This was an era when a lot of phones were doing weird things like this—the Motorola Backflip comes to mind—but still, really.
The “phablet” trend started by the Samsung Galaxy Note led to some experimentation. The weirdest and most awkward experiment was probably this 4:3 wide boi of a smartphone with a “rubberdium” stylus. The idea was to shrink the tablet form factor rather than grow the phone form factor, but the result was a clunker.
There was a lot of talk about modular smartphones from 2013 to 2016, with the most prominent concept being Google’s Project Ara (which never made it to market). LG’s G5 was a modular phone with attachable “friends” including a 360-degree camera (another fad of the time), a camera grip, and an extended battery. It was plagued by reliability problems and LG didn’t offer many attachments, so the modular aspect didn’t really become a selling point.
LG V50 ThinQ 5G Dual Screen (2019)
The V50 was one of America’s first 5G phones, but what made it really unusual was its dual-screen accessory. LG’s answer to the new trend of folding phones, the dual-screen gadget was both additional screen and protective case; you could use the two screens independently. LG kept up the dual-screen theme for the V60, G8x, and Velvet phones, but once again, it didn’t sell.
2020’s most wacky yet inspired phone was the Wing 5G, which had a swiveling screen and a built-in gimbal mode for super-stable video recording. It put a smile on my face, but very little software was customized to work well with the unusual form factor. Its failure to take the mobile world by storm was probably the final nail in LG’s coffin.
