LG Electronics Enthusiasts Bemoan End of Era as Firm Exits Smartphone Business | Best Information

By Joyce Lee and Heekyong Yang

SEOUL (Reuters) – Admirers of LG Electronics smartphones rued the decline of far more affordable Android-primarily based gadgets after the South Korean tech enterprise mentioned on Monday it would quit the company, with some praising LG for the innovation it brought to the market.

LG smartphone buyers in South Korea and the United States posted nostalgic tributes on social media after the agency declared the exit, citing a extended revenue slump. LG however holds a roughly 10% share of the U.S. smartphone marketplace, according to researcher Counterpoint, nevertheless its slice of the world wide pie is just 2%.

“Make sure you launch the Rollable cell phone in advance of you die,” reported a person user on a 300,000 member-solid discussion board on Naver, South Korea’s most significant on-line look for portal, referring to LG’s latest expandable exhibit https://www.cnet.com/news/lg-rollable-telephone-will make-ces-2021-look-and-had been-intrigued notion that the business flaunted at the CES trade exhibit in January.

Fans fondly mentioned some of the firm’s much more unique models, these as a T-formed dual display, as nicely as attributes such as a double-faucet to convert a display on and off.

“LG has some of the best audio hardware of any cell phone,” Kim Dong-woon, who has employed six LG smartphones, told Reuters. “It is really a disgrace that LG is withdrawing.”

Influential U.S. tech reviewers echoed the sentiments.

“LG have been under no circumstances best but in a globe of tedious slabs they shipped some of the most one of a kind phone layouts, suggestions and attributes ever,” stated YouTuber Austin Evans https://twitter.com/austinnotduncan/position/1378894062388797441 on Twitter.

LG, which had been making mobile telephones for about a quarter of a century, in the long run fell driving rivals Apple Inc and Samsung Electronics Co Ltd, in portion thanks to lacklustre promoting and sluggish software package updates.

Its smartphone division logged approximately 6 many years of losses, totalling roughly $4.5 billion by the finish past 12 months.

For all the fandom, some criticised the telephones, stating the shutdown was inescapable.

“The producing has been on the wall for a prolonged time … points did not strengthen,” said consumer cdegallo on Reddit.

(Reporting by Joyce Lee and Heekyong Yang in Seoul Supplemental reporting by Shubham Kalia in Bengaluru Editing by Sayantani Ghosh)

Copyright 2021 Thomson Reuters.