LG's flagship smartphone from last year, the G4, is a fairly decent device, and while it admittedly hasn't set the sales charts on fire, it does have its own set of fans who have been generally satisfied with their purchase. Over the past few months, however, discontent has been brewing amongst a large section of G4 owners, many of whom have been reporting that their beloved gadget is suffering from the dreaded 'boot loop' defect, whereby, the device is failing to successfully boot up and is endlessly restarting. The problem allegedly lies with just about all variants of the device sold worldwide, and is not restricted to any one region or carrier-specific model. While such reports have been doing the rounds of the internet for months now, the chorus has reached a crescendo of late, with more and more people venting their ire at the company's alleged lackluster attitude at the travails of its paying customers.

Now, however, one such LG G4 user has taken matters into his own hands, and has launched a petition on Change.org, ostensibly to shake the South Korean company out of its slumber and do something about what he is alleging to be a 'hardware defect'. The petitioner, Mr. Santiago Archila, is asking the President and CEO of LG Mobile Communications, Mr. Jun-Ho Cho, to "officially acknowledge this major hardware defect and to launch a free replacement program for ALL owners affected by this defect, regardless of the region or model number variant of G4". The petitioner also alleges that LG has thus far apparently either refused to service the 'defective' G4 handsets under some technicality, or the so-called repairs in many cases didn't do much to actually rectify the problem.


It remains to be seen how LG plans to tackle this issue, now that the matter is increasingly getting the sort of press that most companies can well do without. While LG's next-generation flagship smartphone, the G5, is being strongly-rumored of late, the device may be a bit of a hard sell if the company isn't able to address the concerns of its current customers soon enough. Hopefully, the company is already working on a fix, if it's possible to do so with a software update. If, however, the fault indeed lies with the hardware as is being alleged, it will be interesting to see if the company actually officially acknowledges the problem and issues a recall for all its affected models and replaces the errant hardware for free, if only to retain its goodwill as a reliable tier-1 consumer electronics company.