Video: LG Electronics is reviewing everything in its smartphone business
As it introduced the seventh generation of its venerable G smartphone series last week, LG found itself in an interesting feature-marketing shuffle.
Seeking to retreat from the traditional feature war, the company extended the oddly pronounced "ThinQ" subbrand from its CES announcements to its mobile efforts. In doing so, it referred to the improvements it made in such areas as screen brightness and camera capture image quality -- features that would have led previous discussions -- to a relatively brief segment of a concise product introduction.
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However, in terms of how the LG G7 ThinQ uses AI, there's not much that hasn't been introduced to the market, at least markets outside the U.S. The identification of different objects to identify ideal scene modes for the camera was shown off by Huawei at the launch of its Mate 10 Pro. The most meaningful differentiator LG released -- its integration with Google Assistant via a side-mounted button[2] -- of course brings to mind a similar feature by Samsung that brought forth its Bixby agent.
Samsung has since dramatically scaled back its insistence on the button's functionality. It has essentially allowed owners of its phones to neuter the button[3]. However, unlike Amazon and Microsoft, which are working to make Alexa and Cortana BFFs[4], Samsung hasn't supported having the button launch a rival agent. Undoubtedly, most Android owners will prefer having the button launch the much more mature Google Assistant than the evolving Bixby[5], but some percentage of Galaxy S users surely killed the button simply to avoid