Editor's Note: This article was updated Feb. 18 with new information.
LG's G6 will almost certainly be the flagship phone of this year's Mobile World Congress. The No. 3 US smartphone maker will introduce its next flagship phone on February 26, ahead of its rival Samsung's Galaxy S8, and we're eager to see how it blazes its own path.
LG has been much more forthcoming than Samsung with advance details about its phone, including a teaser video and an event invite. Here are the most reliable rumors so far.
When Is the LG G6 Release Date?
The G6 will be announced at a press conference at noon Barcelona time on Sunday, February 26. As always happens, it'll take a few weeks to hit shelves.
What Are the LG G6's Price and Carriers?
LG's phones tend to be slightly less expensive than Samsung's: the LG G5 listed at $649.99 to the Galaxy S7's $760. However, several rumors have been saying that the G6 will be $750 this time around.
LG has an excellent track record for releasing its phones on all US carriers at the same time, and we anticipate that will happen with the G6. The company doesn't have a good track record for releasing unlocked, carrier-free phones in the US, though. There have been no unlocked versions of the G5, V20, or V10 released here, and we'd be surprised if the company changes its course with the G6.
What Are the LG G6's Key Features?
LG released a teaser video on YouTube describing its ideal smartphone, which pretty much everybody agrees is a description of upcoming G6 features.
The G6 teaser video promises:
- A bigger screen, but not a big phone
- Comfortable to hold and use
- One-handed usability
- Waterproof
- "Capture it all at once"
- Reliable
LG also recently spun out a second video showing the software UX experience:
The biggest mystery, really, is what the heck "capture it all at once" means. The LG V20 has a wide-angle camera to go with its standard camera on the back, and that may be what LG is referring to here.
LG Display has talked about a panel with an "18:9 aspect ratio" and a 5.7-inch, 2,880-by-1,440-pixel LCD display with better outdoor viewability and lower power consumption than previous panels. Heat pipes inside the phone will prevent the battery from overheating, execs said.
A waterproof design probably also means the G6 is doing away with the G5's modular strategy, focusing on "aesthetics and usability" instead, according to the Wall Street Journal.
It's now pretty firmly understood that the phone will come with a Qualcomm Snapdragon 821 processor, not the newer Snapdragon 835. That's a time-to-market decision, as LG wants to get its phone out before the Galaxy S8, which is anticipated to be the first Snapdragon 835 device.
The latest view of what the G6 looks like comes from AndroidPure, which says a case manufacturer has released images of a phone that has dual cameras with a flash in between them, and a surprisingly large top and bottom bezels, although the side bezels are very narrow.
This stands in a little bit of opposition to recent LG tease of the screen as "full vision," which will "fill up the entire front face" of the phone, according to a company announcement cited by ZDNet. A render on 9to5Google splits the difference by just positing that "FullVision" is LG's brand for the 18:9 aspect ratio, not for a bezel-free phone.
The Verge claims to have an image of what the phone looks like (below), and says that it will have a headphone jack and a fingerprint sensor on the rear. We're also pretty sure the G6 will run Android 7 Nougat, as LG's V20 already does.
We'll learn more on February 26, and we'll update this story as we learn more, too.
Exclusive: This is LG's G6 smartphone https://t.co/v5Rt7Okrh9 pic.twitter.com/BjJfQETxwd — The Verge (@verge) January 23, 2017