Ron Amadeo

Ron Amadeo

Ron Amadeo

Ron Amadeo

Ron Amadeo

Ron Amadeo

Ron Amadeo

Ron Amadeo

Ron Amadeo

Ron Amadeo

Ron Amadeo











BARCELONA, Spain—We're live from Mobile World Congress, and the time has come for the stampede of high-end Android devices to begin. The first out of the gate—and one of the best looking—is the LG G6, a gorgeous slim-bezeled phone with a truly questionable SoC choice.

After the failure of the LG G5—the company lost nearly $400 million in Q3 2016, which it blamed on "weak sales of [the] G5"—LG is scrapping just about everything from its prior flagship. The modularity is gone, as is the removable battery. Instead, we get a simple slab phone with IP68 water resistance.

Let's first talk about the most eye-catching part of the G6: the screen and slimline bezels. The screen aspect ratio is super-tall: 18:9 (or 2:1? I'm still not sure what to call this yet). The phone is about the usual height and width of all roughly 5-inch phones, but the tiny bezels make room for a taller screen. The corners of the display are rounded to complement the corners of the phone body. The whole thing looks fantastic—if you buy a G6, you're buying it for the design.

I'm a fan of the taller screen. The device is skinny enough that it feels like a "small" 5-inch device, but you get a 5.7-inch screen. The display is bigger in the dimension that really matters—height. A taller screen means more list items, so you can see more emails, more app icons, and more webpage text. Besides watching videos in landscape, a wider screen wouldn't be of much benefit in Android.

Most of the big players this year seem to be giving their flagships tall screens and small bezels. I couldn't be happier. More screen in a smaller body is a great improvement, and they make "traditional" smartphone designs like the Google Pixel and iPhone 7 look dated.

LG is still repeating some of the same mistakes of the G5, though. An early teaser put up by the company claims the LG G6 has a "full metal body," but once again LG is only using metal on the inside of the device. While the sides are metal, the exposed back of the G6—the part you touch—is not metal. It's Gorilla Glass. This is the second year in a row LG has talked about a "metal body" without exposing any of it. Last year, things got so out of hand that LG had to issue a clarifying press release.

The back glass seems to have been treated with some kind of coating that makes it slightly grippy and rubbery. It's certainly not as slick as the glass on the front. Under the glass is a textured paint that looks like brushed aluminum. But even though the back looks like metal, it just isn't.

I'm always disappointed to see an OEM go with a glass back. Sure, a glass back makes life easier on your engineers, but it inevitably leads to disappointed customers picking up bits of broken glass. On the plus side, the glass back allows LG to implement wireless charging, and the G6 has both PMA and Qi charging. Both standards charge at a snail's pace compared to the "quick charge" chargers that are out there, but they're handy for keeping a phone topped off.

The biggest downside of the G6 is LG's inexplicable decision to use a 2016 SoC in its 2017 flagship. The G6 has a Snapdragon 821 instead of the newer, faster, more efficient Snapdragon 835.

I asked at the event, "Why isn't LG shipping a Snapdragon 835 in this device?" Just like the previous rumors, the LG execs pointed to development timing as the reason for the older SoC. The Snapdragon 835 isn't months away from release, though—we know at least one flagship here at MWC uses the new chip. Samsung is already hyping the Snapdragon 835-packing Galaxy S8. If LG originally planned the G6 expecting to have a lead time on the Snapdragon 835 flagships, that lead seems to have evaporated.

We haven't heard anything about pricing yet, but the G6 will quickly find itself in a tough spot in the market. It can't charge flagship prices for last year's chip SoC and expect people to buy it. At our meeting, an LG executive spoke vaguely about wanting to offer "value" to consumers, but he also said pricing and availability will be announced by the carriers. If LG wants the G6 to be successful, it's going to have to find a price point below the Snapdragon 835 devices.

Other specs are 4GB of RAM, 32GB or 64GB of storage, and a 3300mAh battery. The camera configuration is exactly what you'd expect from LG—a dual 13MP camera setup with one wide-angle lens and one normal lens. There's also a rear fingerprint reader. LG says the display is certified for HDR 10 and Dolby Vision.

On the software side of things, the G6 will be the first non-Google phone to launch with the Google Assistant baked in. Assistant works just like on the Pixel: hold down the home button and the Assistant will pop up. The "Ok Google" hotword is set up to work in "always on" mode. That means, no matter what, you can shout "OK Google!" and the phone will wake up and respond. This sounded like a big deal in the run up to the devices unveiling, but today Google is also announcing that the Google Assistant will be available to any phone running Android 6.0 and up.

We must talk about a fun new OEM trend for 2017—distancing yourself from the Galaxy Note 7 debacle. At our meeting, LG put up a big "Battery Stability" slide detailing how its tests all exceeded the "international standard" for testing. The company also bragged about how the separator between battery layers was almost twice as thick as the separator in the Galaxy Note 7. The "nail penetration test," in which some dudes at LG hammer a nail through the battery, sounded fun.

In a vacuum, the G6 is a handsome phone. But we don't know what to make of it without pricing information. We'll be on the lookout for carrier announcements.