Can the LG G3 take on the Galaxy S5? Find out on May 27
Over the past month or so, I’ve been asking friends and colleagues whether they’ll be choosing the HTC One M8 or the Samsung Galaxy S5 when it’s time to upgrade their smartphone. A number of the responses have surprised me. Rather than picking the latter — which I assumed most would — several told me they would be waiting for the LG G3 instead.
That wait will end on May 27, when LG will announce its new flagship at events held simultaneously in six cities around the world.
Last year’s G2 was a hugely successful smartphone — at least for LG. It has a great design, a big and beautiful 1080p display, and excellent specifications. It also boasts a terrific 13-megapixel rear-facing camera — one of the first smartphone cameras to offer optical image stabilization.
Thanks to all of those things, you’ll be hard pushed to find a G2 owner who doesn’t love their phone. It’s no wonder so many people are waiting patiently for the G3, then, which is expected to put up an impressive fight against the Galaxy S5, the One M8, and the rest of 2014’s flagships.
We’ll find out whether it can do that on May 27 after LG today began issuing invites for G3 announcements in San Francisco, London, and New York. The Korean company will also stage events in Seoul, Singapore, and Istanbul the following day.
Unsurprisingly, LG doesn’t reveal anything about its new device in the invite, which features the tagline, “To be simple is to be Great.”
The LG G3’s redesigned buttons.
Hopefully, this indicates the company will take certain things back to basics — namely its software experience. The G2’s software is widely considered be cluttered and slightly over the top, and LG could make a lot of people happy by stripping that back and making it a little more streamlined.
As for its hardware, recent rumors have claimed the G3 will feature a 5.5-inch 2K display with a 1440×2560 resolution, 2.3 GHz quad-core Snapdragon 801 processor, 3GB of RAM, and 32GB of internal storage. We may also see the rear-facing camera upgraded to a 16-megapixel sensor, and we know from leaked images (right) that LG has redesigned the handset’s back-mounted buttons.
