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LG Is Abandoning the Modular Smartphone Idea (theverge.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: LG's modular phone accessory strategy that served as the primary differentiator for last year's G5 smartphone appears to be no more. The Wall Street Journal reports that the South Korean company is pivoting away from the plug-in "Friends" modules for the upcoming G6 device after lackluster sales for the G5. Per The Wall Street Journal, an LG spokesperson commented that consumers aren't interested in modular phones. The company instead is planning to focus on functionality and design aspects for the upcoming G6, which Chief Technologist Skott Ahn says will be released "in the very near future." According to the WSJ, the LG G6 will arrive "in the very near future," which suggests the phone will launch at Mobile World Congress next month.
Hate to say it, but a bad idea in search of a problem...
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
As long as they don't abandon the construction techniques or baseline selling points of the existing G3/4/5, I don't care about modularity, although if I was in the right place in my phone lifecycle to get a G5, I definitely would have.
LG is the only company making a flagship phone with a removable battery and a card reader. Being able to swap a battery after shooting a lot of photos or video is infinitely better than being tethered to an external battery, and moving cards around has obvious benefits as well.
But the G3/4/5 are also held together with actual screws. You don't have to delaminate any glass. You don't need suction cups or special pry tools to fix one. I can completely field strip one to its components in about 90 seconds. This is a huge selling point, especially after some of the bullshit I've had to do to work on newer Apple and Samsung phones.
As long as the G6 keeps those aspects, it's all good.
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
and their low end is serviceable. My coworker has been using an $600 LG for going on 5 years now. I've had one of their $150 phones for going on 2 years now and it's tolerable. It could get better signal, but then again it's a non-Band 12 T-Mobile phone. Not enough short range spectrum.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Of course, the big question is: will they be smart enough to keep the user-replaceable battery?
A government is a body of people notably ungoverned - AC
The idea behind the G5 modularity is a good one but their implementation sucked.
- It is a metal phone that looks plastic. What's the big idea? For phones, plastic is superior in almost all areas except look. LG got is backwards here.
- Their flagship camera grip module is a failure. You couldn't even turn on the camera using the physical button, and the extra battery was so poorly managed that it is no better than a generic external battery pack.
- Poor build quality, poor software, and LG doesn't have an especially good track records when it comes to reliability.
- Not very developer-friendly (locked bootloader, root, etc...). Few people actually care about that but those who are interested in modular phones are more likely to be in this group.
The physical attachment and interface of the Moto series is cool. But the "mods" are all wrong.
The only reason to be able to detach a module is because you don't want to have to lug it around, so you can detach it. This implies that when you attach to a module, you're explicitly in "I understand that it's bulky and I'm not lugging it around" mode at that moment.
Yet all the modules are severely compromised because they are still trying to be portable.
Half-assed mobile speakers in the Moto series. A half-assed digital camera.
Just take those two examples:
Instead of mobile speakers, how about a $199 stereo speaker system for a tabletop. Instead of having to fuck around with bluetooth and compromised battery life, the speakers are stationary, a home furnishing. You come and just drop your phone *on* it. Magnets hold it in place. It charges. And the screen comes on to the music player app and plays big, loud, full-sound music. Gotta run? Just yank the phone, now charged, off of it again. Make a boombox the same way—or something big enough (not those speakers) to actually make some sound and take to a beach party. Those things I'd be interested in. Tiny-ass speakers? Why am I going to lug around an extra thing for sound that's still basically one person big?
Same thing with the camera. A 12 megapixel 1 2/3" sensor. THAT'S A CAMERA PHONE ALL OVER AGAIN. I love the idea of a proper shutter button and a flash, but if your built-in camera is already not good enough, why slap an extra, bulky module on the back that... gives you another camera phone sensor? WTF? If you're willing to carry a camera, you're willing to carry a camera. So build one that's a centimeter thicker and has a full 1" sensor in it, and another one that is three centimeters thicker and looks like a DSLR camera body and can mount Micro Four Thirds lenses. It's just got a gap on the back where you can stick your phone, snap, with a magnet. Do so an the phone automatically goes into camera mode. You can mount pro lenses, and when you shoot, it stores on your camera SD card and you have all the photos available to cloud, apps, etc. without having to download from a proper camera or futz around with "camera wifi" that never works. As a shooter, I'd be interested in *both* of those camera modules. But not a bulky camera module that is just a camera phone all over again, so that you double the thickness and weight for (drum roll) the same crap cameraphone sensor that you have without the module.
I don't think it's a tech fail, and I do think that there is a market for modularity, but it's not in this "half as portable, but still half-functional" module crap. The value is a convenience value, i.e. a better, more capable version of Apple's original iPhone docking port that is magnetic, more capable, communicates with the phone sufficiently to enable tap-free adaptation to new modules, and that has a full-surface (rather than end-port) interface to enhance the physical security of the attachment when made. That's still modular, and it uses the phone as the brain of things to make life easier. I'd pay for that.
But I won't pay for extra for a phone just so that I can use "modules" when the modules are expensive, highly compromised, bulky things that I don't want. I have to want the modules to want a modular phone. A tiny speaker, a crap camera, etc. are not modules that I want, and extended batteries are already out there.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
As long as there is no law forcing them to make batteries easy to change and available for 10 years, they will not.
The new replacement for the Compute Stick could have been an attractive idea for a 'modular' form factor, if they would make it run on very low power. Just have your screen, basic controls, cellular radio, and a battery, and then slap the new Compute Card over it. Instead of having to buy a whole new phone, you just drop in an upgraded Compute Card.
Oh well. Someone might take this idea and run with it.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Except you should not forget how LG is treating users with the boot loop defect. The G4 suffers from an internal defect on the main board that causes a bricked phone that will only boot briefly before it resets. It takes anywhere from days to many months to appear, usually when the phone is hot.
LG acknowledges the problem, but refuses to fix it for any phone outside of the 12 month warranty, even though it is a design defect.
That is like Ford refusing to recall cars with bad airbags because they are more than a year old. LG wants YOU to pay for their mistake.
NEVER BUY LG.
You hit the nail in the head!
non-standard modules is a big no-no, motorola is also trying to get a modular phone going with moto z, but the modules are made by them, and only work it that phone, so they are hard to come by, expensive, and you cannot use them after an upgrade or if you change phones. I was really excited by project ara, but then google for some reason decided that changing the screen and chipset would not be possible and then, for some reason, created modules that were pretty useless like a tic tac/pill holder (why???) and the modularity became a gimmick.
The current, last-generation Fairphones are not only fully modular, but all the bits can be dismounted with a single normal screwdriver, and each part can be replaced separately in case of failure (and of course, the battery too).
My understanding is Fairphone, who started from a more compact model (which I own), evolved this way profiting from the trend to enlarge devices (bigger screens) : this allowed them to design element interfaces that otherwise wouldn't have fit in smaller models.
And IMHO that was a very wise move : they basically brought the design back to Europe (from China) way before being, er... tweeted to do so...
My only issue with this model is its cost (some 500€, twice the previous model).
As the thing is very recent there are not many alternate elements for now (I hear about better cameras, saw a breadboard for a large USB slot allowing the use of these hardware-key-dongles...)
But it definitely is a Lego-like phone (inside!), comes optionally rooted and optionally with Sailfish OS instead of Android, two SIM slots... almost a dream come true for me...
And my experience with the earlier Fairphone1 is excellent.
Herve S.
A keyboard. Change out the back, add a little extra battery juice, and give me back a sliding keyboard in the mode of the Motorola D4. Then, old farts could finally type again whilst in the field.
I've not experienced this issue. At the same time, LG is also the only company making a phone with hardware that works the way all smartphone hardware should. I don't believe the matter is "never buy LG" but "don't buy any smartphone that doesn't at least have a removable battery and an SD card reader" and that doesn't leave us with very many options, does it?
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
What about to make a new QWERTY phone after 7+ years. No BlackBerry - it needs to have a keyboard on its longer side, have landscape display and have physical arrow keys. More extra keys for shifts+symbols are a plus.