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Android Businesses

LG To Shut Down Smartphone Business (cnet.com) 50

Posted by msmash from the end-of-an-era dept.
LG has become the latest legacy phone-maker to exit "the incredibly competitive mobile phone sector" as it struggles in a market dominated by Apple, Samsung and growing Chinese manufacturers. From a report: The South Korean company said it will close its mobile business unit by the end of July. Instead of smartphones, it will focus on smart home products -- an area where it's one of the biggest providers -- as well as electric vehicle components, robotics, artificial intelligence, business-to-business products and other connected devices. LG's decision to wind down its phone business reflects the struggles faced by many companies in the market. Apple and Samsung have long been the only companies that make significant amounts of money from smartphones, and even they have struggled at times. Consumers are holding onto their phones longer than before, and they're increasingly seeking out less expensive models, like Samsung's Galaxy A lineup instead of its Galaxy S flagship devices.
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LG To Shut Down Smartphone Business More

LG To Shut Down Smartphone Business

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  • Well... poo (Score:3, Informative)

    by dahlellama ( 3489405 ) on Monday April 05, 2021 @09:13AM (#61238344)
    I love LG phones... this sucks.

    • Terrible when Nokia left. ;-)

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by brunes69 ( 86786 )

      LG has been *the worst* flagship brand when it comes to software updates for years.

      With this move, everyone who owns an LG handset is likely going to be yet again be left up the creek without a paddle.

      Good riddance IMHO.

      • Life's Good my ass.

        • More like (un)Lucky Goldstar

          Bought my LG a few years back based on one single item - longest battery life. The rest of the features were comparable to others, including the price. (OK, one of the larger screens, which I preferred, being somewhat on the larger size myself).

          Currently have a Samsung for work, and regularly use iPhones.
          Given the minimal differences in UI, I'm strongly reminded of the line about all electronics eventually becoming mere commodities, and the user data being the main selling feat

          • Bought my LG V30 primarily for the Hi-Res Quad DAC ESS Sabre sound chip and the 3.5mm headphone jack. The jack never worked right since the first day, the plug keeps popping out and it seems this is not exceptional to just mine. Additionally the phone would have to be split in two to replace said jack. They have nobody else to blame but themselves for the predicament they're currently in. Lesson learned.

            • Yeah ... I have to LG X Power 2 ... and have had zero issues with it. The jack has worked like a charm ... even use my gaming headset with it.

              That said, I've seen the statistics. I'm lucky - looks like quality issues have plagued LG for years, and they really haven't addressed them.

              When I buy something like a phone, I'd like the company to have a decent rep for quality, rather than gambling a few (to several) hundred bucks on a crap shoot.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by kalpol ( 714519 )
        Lineage has supported them pretty well. With the international versions and a little fiddling you get a really nice updated phone for cheap - on five or six years now with my G4. The worst part has been the US carrier lockdown and terrible software, not LG's fault really.

    • Which is kinda the reason why, you shouldn't follow Slashdot for any sort of business advice. The products that Slashdot Users tend to love, often don't stick around long.
      LG, Nokia, Palm WebOS...

      While Gurrr.. Apple and Samsung suck so much, that they doomed!

      • Re:Well... poo (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Voyager529 ( 1363959 ) <voyager529@yahoo. c o m> on Monday April 05, 2021 @10:55AM (#61238746)

        Which is kinda the reason why, you shouldn't follow Slashdot for any sort of business advice. The products that Slashdot Users tend to love, often don't stick around long.
        LG, Nokia, Palm WebOS...

        While Gurrr.. Apple and Samsung suck so much, that they doomed!

        Respectfully...more of this post is contentious than not...

        1.) Nobody follows Slashdot for business advice. There is a niche here who have different preferences than consumers ("Less space than a Nomad..."), but it's rare that Slashdot is seen as influential for actual products.

        2.) LG as a brand has been around for quite some time, even if you ignore its Goldstar days. LG isn't going anywhere as a company; they will still make TVs and refrigerators and air conditioners and plenty of other things...and they've been making Android phones for over a decade, so I don't know what your criteria for "not sticking around long" would be.

        3.) Nokia as a brand was loved by...basically-everyone; it wasn't just the Slashdot crowd. Nokia largely existed the US market long before smartphones were the default. If they released feature phones in the '04-'07 years, I never saw one. I know their Symbian phones were popular in Europe and maybe that was a solid business direction at the time, but I wanted one and couldn't find one locally for years. Then, Elop famously came in and bet the farm on Windows Phone, and that bet was lost. Nokia then focused on making infrastructure gear, where they're doing pretty well. The phone brand was then sold to HMD Global, and while the naming convention sucks, if you haven't tried a Nokia 7.1 or 7.2, take a look. Everything you need (including GoogleOne certification so they're still getting Android updates), nothing you don't (wallpapers and ringtones are literally the only carrier-included anything), and at half the price of even OnePlus phones.

        4.) WebOS was liked as a concept around here, but it was abundantly clear that it wasn't going anywhere, even at the time. I'm not sure how they made the list here; it's not like there was much of a consensus that Palm was going to beat even Blackberry, even in 2009, or even when HP released the tablet version...

        5.) Samsung's issues are well-known - lots of unnecessary, unremovable software, lack of modular features that the rest of the industry also doesn't really have anymore, patchy OS update history...but few will argue that the hardware isn't solid or that the company is somehow doomed because modern handsets don't include IR blasters. Apple's critique generally stems from the fundamental issues with their 'walled garden' restrictions, high price tags, and patchy responses to mass hardware failures. Either way, there is certainly dislike for these facets of these companies, but I'm hard pressed to see any meaningful amount of consensus regarding either company's impending demise.

      • If it doesn't sell, it's finished. I know. I worked for HTC for five years started right when the HTC One M7 Launched. Remember them?
    • Agreed. Best DACs. If you use your phone as your everywhere media device, this hurts.

      Apple is crap. Samsung double so. As the USA is Chinese averse, this becomes really sad.

    • I don't. I had an LG K8 and it was the most frustrating piece of shit I ever had to work with.

    • My first few smartphones were low-midrange LGs. I liked them. The very short duration of updates, and the tendency of the Micro-USB connectors to break, were my only major complaints, and the latter may well have been my fault for plugging and unplugging them at least a half-dozen times a day.

  • Growing? As in Huawei is making a comeback?

  • You need a Steve Jobs to be different. (Score:3)

    by jellomizer ( 103300 ) on Monday April 05, 2021 @09:24AM (#61238382)

    My Samsung S20, next to the original iPhone that is 13 years older, still holds the basic design structure. Sure it has a curved screen, and less buttons, and the CPU is faster and the screen is better. but still it is kinda the same product. A glass square that is mostly screen.

    While the folding display technology shows some new innovation they are still too expensive for most people. And there isn't someone like Steve Jobs anymore who is able push new technology and design to a public, and make them want it. It is now different, and different is scary, so people don't buy it, and the product falls on a click bait social media link to technology failure lists.

    LG has a problem, they will either make devices that copy Samsung (which had copied Apple) and just be the cheap alternative to a more popular line of product. Or they try to make something new and unique, which can never hit the light of day, because too many people find it too different and scary to give it a try.

    LG also seems to be taking what Slashdot are saying as the problem with these devices to heart. OMG Headphone Jacks, Replaceable Batteries, Keyboards... are gone!!!. Well LG will keep those headphone jacks, in which only a very few people actually care that much about these changes to make that a decision maker.
    So LG is both in a problem of not changing and changing too much to make themselves actually standout.

    • Re:You need a Steve Jobs to be different. (Score:4, Informative)

      by brunes69 ( 86786 ) <slashdot@nOSpam.keirstead.org> on Monday April 05, 2021 @09:27AM (#61238388)

      I don't know why you're saying that Samsung is copying Apple, when it's been the opposite for the past several years. All major new features, functions, and even design changes are happening in Samsung phones first, Apple later on.

      • Re:You need a Steve Jobs to be different. (Score:4, Insightful)

        by jellomizer ( 103300 ) on Monday April 05, 2021 @09:38AM (#61238434)

        A square piece of glass, controlled by gestures, and various sensors. Which they decide to call it a phone, while the phone feature is one of its smallest feature.

        It is a copy of the iPhone. Sure over the past decade they had added some features which Apple had copies into their line, but Apple also added features which Samsung has taken too.

        Both Apple and Samsung seem to have a 1 year release schedule, where they are about 6 months apart from each other.
        So Apple makes a product that copies a bunch of cool new features that Samsung had, and added a a few others.
        6 months later Samsung makes a product that copies a bunch of cool new features that Apple had and adds a few others....

        But the actual innovation was the iPhone, with having a button reduced glass square, that is mostly touch screen controlled, and with a bunch of sensors. Back when the iPhone was released, it really was a game changer, that had changed the Phone market drastically.

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by Scoth ( 879800 )

          It's hard to say who was "first" due to the sort of release cycles that things like that have, but the LG KE850 predated the iPhone announcement by a bit and is basically the same as you describe. It's not like Apple was somehow alone in figuring out the black rectangle with a button thing. They did, however, revolutionize the interface. I'd say that's probably more important than the hardware itself. Phones before were complex and clunky interfaces with lots of menus and levels and even the KE850 wasn't ex

          • Re:You need a Steve Jobs to be different. (Score:4, Insightful)

            by BrainJunkie ( 6219718 ) on Monday April 05, 2021 @10:37AM (#61238662)
            The LG KE850 wasn't Symbian, it was LG's custom UI written in Flash.

            It wasn't at all competitive with the iphone. The thinking behind it was obviously stuck in the "feature phone" era. It had no QWERTY keyboard, for instance. Where Apple really hit it out of the park was putting a full blown web browser on board and making it useful via the pinch-to-zoom gesture. That really set the stage for people to stop thinking about these things as phones that happened to do email and text and start thinking of them as mobile computers that happen to have a phone app.

            Which is why, until a recent update, it baffled me why Apple let phone calls take over the UI.

        • A square piece of glass, controlled by gestures, and various sensors. Which they decide to call it a phone, while the phone feature is one of its smallest feature.

          It is a copy of the HTC smart-phones.

          Fixed that for you.

          Apple did not make the first smart-phones.

        • By that logic, every car is a copy of a Ford Model T

      • Care to name a few?

    • Your statement is ironic when you consider the iPhone ripped off the LG KE850. Granted they may have been developed independently given the timelines. But still it shows that phones were moving in that direction. I mean, we all knew years before the iPhone came out that large touchscreen interfaces would be successful. Reference: https://hardware.slashdot.org/... [slashdot.org]

  • They can't be shutting down the whole mobile unit:

    LG said it will continue to sell current phone inventory, and it will provide service, support and software updates for customers of existing mobile devices for "a period of time, which will vary by region." The company's US business didn't respond to a request for information about how long it will support US-based customers.

  • Case in point: I bought an LG Optimus 2X. The first dual core phone. It was excellent when it came out. Then within months, certainly less than a year, they stopped supporting it. No updates, etc. That was the last LG phone I bought (aside from the Google branded ones where they are forced to provide support), and now I generally avoid that company's products. Yes, that was a long time ago. But it's amazing what consumers who drop a lot of money on a product remember. Samsung is even shittier. I had one of their tablets break down with what turned out to be a known issue with the video connector in it. When I called their customer service they basically blamed me for dropping it (how do we know you didn't break the screen) and insisted I had to take it to Best Buy or other retailer to send it in; I couldn't send it directly even though I bough it online. And I never dropped it more than throwing it on the bed or a couch. Certainly no drop to the floor. So maybe this is a Korean company thing. I don't buy their shit either. I avoid Korean products now.

    • Racism, is that a Canadian thing?

      • Oh ho you antfa SJW racist cunt. If you can't figure out I am talking about Korean corporate culture you should just hang yourself now. You day in and day out slag every aspect of American corporate culture and American culture in general, but you dare question if someone has the same question about how business is done in other countries. I'm surprised someone with so little sense of nuance mixed with an overcharged sense of outrage manages not to soil yourself on a daily basis just from opening your brow

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Ecuador ( 740021 )

      Samsung is known for their horrible service, at least in the UK, not sure if they are the same all over the world. They avoid warranty service any way possible and won't be helpful in general. From my own experience, as well as retail forums. I have vowed to never buy their stuff again.
      Never had an LG experience, I was hoping they'd be better, as they make some nice OLEDs and I will be looking for a replacement to my Plasma at some point soon...

    • Apple isn't much better in this regard, if a bird farts on your phone Apple will say it's not repairable and you'll have to buy a new one.

  • A real shame for headphone users. (Score:5, Informative)

    by PhrostyMcByte ( 589271 ) <phrosty@gmail.com> on Monday April 05, 2021 @09:48AM (#61238468) Homepage

    While most others have long since removed the headphone jack, LG doubled down on the jack by throwing in a high-end DAC/amp capable of powering high-ohm headphones and with audio quality higher than not just any other phone, but many respected desktop devices as well.

    It makes me sad to see them go -- their update schedule was horrific, and their UI was not great compared to Google's versions, but their audio was phenomenal.

    • But absolute proof that the market has moved on and almost nobody cares. Time and time again, here, on Slashdot, I heard that *everyone* wanted a headphone jack and it was just lack of availability that was the problem and if someone would just make a flagship with a headphone jack it would sell out.

      Welp, no. Wrong.

      Like, I don't begrudge people for wanting a headphone jack, even though I personally think it's a complete waste of space and I'm glad it's gone. But nerds think that we're the market for all tec

  • if their plan for staying competitive is selling IoT garbage. Not to mention, if there's something the world is in no need of, it's more "smart" shit.

  • Why not forget market share, camera bumps, foldable screens, ecosystems and other distractions to consider a more ethical phone that allows you to swap out software and hardware and has just updated its 2nd device from Android 7.0 to 9.0 six years after launch: https://arstechnica.com/gadget... [arstechnica.com]

  • Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Monday April 05, 2021 @10:29AM (#61238616)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Why build a device when you can just profit from your ideas and prior work. Marketplace is getting smaller as it matures.

  • Ok, they have good headphone sockets, and that may be of some value.

    But their update policy was atrocious. 1 year down the line your new high end phone would turn into toxic waste, and only because LG can't be bother to provide updates. Sorry, that stuff does not fly anywhere outside of the ultra-budget segment.

  • I had a LG V20, and it seemed like a very good investment at the time. However LG made the experience really bad. They would have needed to try to purposefully sabotage their own products.

    First, I was drawn in because of replaceable battery, good screen, respectable specs, and a high quality "quad-dac" audio processor. Out of the box it allowed DSD and worked great with high impedance headphones. I was really happy.

    However the relationship slowly started getting sour. First they had their own custom UI, inc

  • Their phones were crap.

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