Well, it is official. LG Electronics is leaving the smartphone industry. I only have two words for that:
Good Bloody Riddance, okay that’s three, but anyway…
LG, as some of us old-schoolers may remember, is the abbreviated acronym of Lucky Goldstar. Some of you may have owned items from Goldstar i.e. microwaves, dishwashers, radios, TV sets (that’s we called them back then), you get the picture. Goldstar then had merged with Lucky Chemicals (formerly Luk Hai, pronounced the same in Korean as well as English) in 1995 forming the major conglomerate that we see today.
Okay, now that I’ve gotten all the horsecrap outta way, I’m just here to voice my thoughts and opinions on why this Asian Electronics giant is cutting ties in the smartphone industry…
I was first introduced to LG in the early 2000’s and needless to say I was very impressed by what I’d seen and heard. Around that time, I had left Verizon to join T-Mobile when they were virtually brand new companies, and LG had this one phone called the VX-8100, which was only available to VZW at the time.
Side note: Around that time, there was a bill passed that as of 2005 (or 2006), whatever your phone number was, you could now keep it! Gone was the headache of changing numbers while simultaneously changing carriers as well. And seeing that I’ve had my number going on 20 years, those ten digits are indelibly marked into my history!
Back to the VX!
This marvelous phone, the price at the time escapes me, but it wasn’t cheap, that’s for sure! Nowadays you can get one dirt cheap on Amazon or eBay for literally pennies on the dollar! This phone was one of the most popular flip phones of the 2000s to say the least. It served as a speakerphone, media player, portable storage, even an online feature called “V Cast”. Granted, all these had come at a price, and that price battery drainage, which pretty much defeated the purpose of “long battery life”. Now understand, this was years before the iPhone had come out, and I forgot to mention that V Cast wasn’t cheap, either. If you clicked on the VX8100 link above, it should provide all the specs and details. I don’t have time to discuss all the specifics of a now obsolete 20 year-old cell phone. One thing that really excited me about that particular phone, was you could listen to media with the phone opened as well as closed, which, to me, at least, was a novelty. Most of my cell phones were bricks with retractable antennas prior to that.
Another LG phone I’ve owned, was the VX8700.
This is where my relationship with both LG and Verizon had gone south… and that’s putting it mildly!
Long story short, I’d gone through not one, not two, not three, not even four, but SEVEN of these phones! I really wanted to get either the Motorola RAZR, or one of the first Droid phones.
Sidebar: I was promised by VZW that because of my years of loyalty, I was eligible for a Droid phone (that fell through, and I was pretty much done with both VZW and LG at that point).
Back to the VX, the second one!
I’d mentioned the RAZR earlier, and this particular LG was a competitor, mainly a cheap knock-off of the RAZR. The features in common was a very sleek exterior with a flush keypad. They both oozed luxury and even sexiness at the same time. But on the flip side, the battery life was terrible, the RAZR had shorted, even caused fires, whereas the VX8700 either wouldn’t hold a charge, or it would short, or just flat out die on you! And every time I had the phone replaced, I’d lose most of my information, numbers, texts, etc. One day I’d had enough and went to a Verizon store crosstown and told the salesman that this has got to be rectified in some way! When I told him what had happened with phone number 7, he immediately was able to fix it! Little did I realize that the LG VX8700 and I would be a thing of the past! I ended up with…
An LG Chocolate! Which I’ve wanted to the longest time since I couldn’t afford either an iPod, iPhone, or even the very first LG Chocolate (which debuted approximately one year before the iPhone did). This act of kindness definitely restored my faith in VZW and yours truly was happy once again, because I was gonna slap both LG and VZW with a lawsuit, because that debacle with the VX8700 was ridiculous, man! Now that that story is over, I can continue with this one. The unfortunate thing for me was this particular phone was a clamshell (flip phone), not a slider like its predecessors. From what I recall, the 1st Gen LG Chocolate was the best one made, the 2nd Gen Chocolate, not so hot, the flip phone-3rd Gen, almost better than the first two! You could take pictures with the phone open or shut, you could even watch videos with the phone shut, and the speaker quality was to die for!
Fast forward years later, and this time, I’ll be brief and get right into it!
I eventually joined other carriers with my phone number still intact, and I was with Metro POS (yes, you read that right, piece of crap), and I bought an LG Optimus. Remember the adage “those who forget history are condemned to repeat it“? Well, that was me again, unfortunately. The proverbial “dog has returned to its vomit” as it were. But in return I came across a very vital tidbit of information that distributors are not supposed to share with consumers like you and I. The Optimus M MS690 and the VX8700 shared a lot in common, and I’ll leave it right there, I’ve wasted more than enough time on the blogosphere as it was. But that little secret, that most consumers don’t know of. Some of these companies deliberately make faulty products for the reasons that 1) they’re cheap, 2) they’re also aware that these were defective from the start, 3) they also knew that customers were gonna want their money back, so the distributors shelled out as many units as possible just to get rid of them, even to the point of replacing them for free or a small fee. My run with LG phones were done for good despite that little gold nugget of priceless information that was given to me years ago. Now a decade later, LG is “cutting the cord”, as it were, and as they should!
Years of losses (I wonder why) are the main reason why Lucky Goldstar is cutting bait. Kinda sucks, because I’ve owned both “peaches and lemons” from them over the years. But my thoughts an opinions are this: Over the decades I’ve owned Goldstar/LG appliances, and I’ve even owned an A/C from Kenmore that had an LG compressor inside of it! And it was ice cold in the summer, too. Long story short, LG was-and is-still killing it in the appliance game! I mentioned the window A/C unit from Sears, but I’ve owned microwaves, radios, even a dishwasher, LG is one of the best brands out there when it comes to appliances.
But the cell phone was the Achilles Heel for them.
Tough titty said the kitty when the milk ran dry!
So while most of what I’ve written tonight consists of my thoughts and opinions, I did want to point out that LG was one of the first smartphone makers, at one point in time it was number 3 in the smartphone category (you already know what the first two are), and they had some of the best designs on the market, and still do, to some point! But remember the issues that I wrote about earlier in this article? The two LG lemons that I owned? By itself, that alone wasn’t the reason why LG is cutting bait, it’s a reason, but not the reason. It was as Apple, Samsung, and Motorola was moving up in the industry, LG had gotten complaisant, set in their ways, as it were. Q4 2020 had pretty much sealed the deal for them. Somewhere down the road, LG didn’t pay as much attention to their cellular brand as they have their other electronics. And that was their undoing.
As stated on more than one occasion, I’m just voicing my opinions and my past experiences with LG. I only hope that longtime LG phone owners will eventually make up their minds as to where they’re gonna go from here. God forbid, they end up being just as stubborn as the manufacturers.
To quote the late Bill Bonds, “if you don’t change, if you don’t adjust, you go bye-bye”!
Truer words have never been spoken.
