South Korean models pose with LG’s new premium smartphone V20 during a launch event in Seoul on September 7, 2016. JUNG YEON-JE/AFP/Getty Images.
LG’s new flagship V20 has hit the shelves in the U.S., one month following the initial rollout on its home turf South Korea. After its G5 experiment with a modular battery earlier this year crashed and burned in sales, the Korean electronics company needs its second flagship of 2016 to bail it out of snowballing record losses.
For that, it needs a major hero (and media coverage, inviting a small group of international journalists to its Korean factory). The new high-end gadget has nearly everything a phablet fanboy would need, with ramped-up multimedia features, a quad-core Snapdragon 820 processor and a sleek exterior. It is a smart, safe upgrade to the V10, the first flagship of the series launched last year, without the daring chances of the G5.
“Regardless of the G5’s results, we have been feeling the pressure in many ways…The V20 is going to be an important turning point for LG Mobile internally and externally,” Young-su Choi, the vice president who oversaw V20 product development, said during the tour.
The new phone’s superfast and accurate fingerprint sensor on the back, the always-on second screen at the top, the full-looking 5.7-inch main screen, the wide-angle camera lenses on both sides and the virtual unbreakability all won me over. But unfortunately for LG, it has not only Samsung’s Galaxy and Apple’s iPhone but now Google’s Pixel to compete with. Are their professional-grade features enough to keep LG’s head above water?
It depends, perhaps, on where you are. The V20 is chock full of features that a user in Korea would love — like an easily removable back cover to swap out the battery, which is a near daily activity for a commuting Seoulite, and an impressive quad-DAC audio system that cuts out white noise for audiophiles — but possibly to its detriment. For example, the maze of menus to navigate to find functions on its feature-packed native apps have an Asian-esque layout akin to popular regional messengers like LINE and Kakao, differing from simplified intuitive user interfaces of some U.S.-developed apps.
Which left me thinking: Would this high-octane, professional-grade phone be too…Asian for the U.S. market?
Multimedia
LG probably doesn’t think so, considering the extensive effort it has put into catering to both its major markets of East Asia and the U.S. Take, for example, its photo and video functions. Warming up to social media generators, the V20’s multimedia is a huge step up from its predecessor, chock full of content creation tools that you might find either gimmicky or brilliant.
“One market-leading advantage of the V20 is that it is not just about consuming content, it enables the creation of content — it is about production, rather than simply playback,” says LG mobile marketing director Kevin Lee.
After trying two front-facing cameras on the G5, LG did away with the original normal view and instead kept the wide angle selfie cam for the V20, adding another wide angle on the back for good measure. That’s three cameras, and there’s a lot you can do with them.
A wide angle lens in the LG V20 (top) expands the range of what is captured by the smartphone’s camera. GLENN CHAPMAN/AFP/Getty Images.
They improved the steady recording technology, featured on the V10 and G5, to muffle the shakes during video recording.
LG has also latched onto the latest craze of focus peaking in the manual photo setting, adding neon teal focused edges like in the latest DSLR cameras. Plus, there is an exposure lock, and eight filters tuned by professional photographers, like Instagram but with mundane titles like “Film 1” and “Film 2.”
My favorite toy is the multi-view camera, carried on from the V10, which records photo or video with all three cameras at once. If marketed right, it could be a vlogger’s dream come true.
The vastly functional cameras seem to be an engineer’s sandbox, but it takes some practice to find where everything is. Plus, some features seem to be named and positioned differently between the audio and video apps, like their capabilities for directional audio and blocking out wind noise.
These are all gadgets geared toward its U.S. users who are way more into Snapchat and other video content platforms than in Asia, where Snapchat’s clone Snow, made in Korea and a hit in China, has only recently begun to take off across the continent.
In contrast, LG found that Asian users, particularly those in megacities, value the audio quality instead. It could be due to their long commutes on public transport, whereas Americans are more likely to drive and hook up the device to a sound system via Bluetooth, LG officials said.
“In Asian markets like Korea, Hong Kong and Taiwan, audio is what’s very important for the users, but it doesn’t seem so in the U.S. market,” V20 product manager Ian Hwang says, adding that qualities like durability and steady recording or other video features were more important there. And that is how it’s focusing its marketing campaigns for each region.
One of LG’s proudest advancements on the new V20 is its audio playback delivered by a 32-bit quad-DAC (digital-to-analog converter) system, which essentially cuts background noise in half for a crisper, more authentic sound. Following the single DAC of last year’s V10, it doubled the ante in the G5 released earlier this year and put four in the latest model, with the aim to rival professional standalone systems that cost upwards of $1,000. The difference is most palpable on high-performance headphones, although the included Bang Olufsen luxury earphones also relay the deeper, richer sound.
Yet those efforts may be under-appreciated in the all-important U.S. market, whose users LG notes prefer Bluetooth speakers anyway.
This article was originally written in: http://www.forbes.com/sites/elaineramirez/2016/10/30/could-the-lg-v20-be-too-asian-for-the-u-s/. You can use, free of charge, when Creative Commons (CC) license appears in article source. CC is an American non-profit organization devoted to expanding the range of creative works available for others to build upon legally and to share. If you detect that is not authorized, please contact with us to delete.