LG had a good 2014, posting record quarterly shipments and doubling its annual profits. The company released some eye-catching smartphones (and smartwatches), but much of its success came down to solid, affordable mid-range devices.
With Mobile World Congress, the telecom industry’s biggest event, taking place next week, LG has revealed four new mid-range products ahead of time that will be important for its continued success in 2015.
The devices range from four-inches (Joy), to 4.5-inches (Leon), 4.7-inches (Spirit), and five-inches (Magna). Each is available in 3G and LTE flavors.
The three larger phones are all powered by a 1.2GHz chip (3G models) or 1.3GHz quad-core chip (4G versions) with Android (5.0) Lollipop installed out of the box. The main difference is each one’s camera and battery capacity.
The LG Magna, Spirit and Leon each offers an eight-megapixel rear camera, which drops to five-megapixels on the 3G model. The Magna packs the highest quality front-facing camera (five-megapixels), followed by the Spirit (one-megapixel) and Leon (VGA camera).
The Joy is the entry-level model, with a choice of 1.2GHz quad-core or 1.2GHz dual-core processors, and a five-megapixel rear camera and front-facing VGA on both versions.
LG often debuts new features and design ideas with its high-end devices first. True to form, a number of settings from its top phones made their way into this mid-range line-up, including the hand-triggered selfie timer ‘gesture shot’, and ‘glance view’ for pulling up important notifications.
There is no confirmed price for the phones at this point, but you can be sure they will be significantly cheaper than the likes of Apple’s iPhone and Samsung’s soon-to-arrive Galaxy S6. The four new LG phones will begin hitting the retail market in “selected” countries from this week, the Korean company said.
“For millions of consumers around the world, the deciding factor on which smartphone to buy isn’t how fast or how big it is but how balanced it is. With our new mid-range smartphones, more and more customers will be looking to LG for their next handsets,” commented Juno Cho, head of LG Mobile, in a statement.
