What LG Needs to Do With its Phones

For better or worse, Nokia is still the king of cell phones. The Finns’ stranglehold on the perfect balance of reponsiveness, portability and functionality continues, despite the assault of hype-driven competitors like (sigh) the iPhone 3G. Hard to believe? Just look at the sales figures for Q2 2008.

Anyways, one company that should take a cue from the dominator is LG. Lately, they’ve made some inroads into Europe and Asia with their style-driven offerings. But this kind of focus limits the potential for success.

Go Beyond Style

It’s easy to see why LG is all about style. Again, we return to the iPhone. Apple has always done a great job of cultivating that sort exclusivity attractive to customers. Though a certain brand of precocity, plus legions of loyal fans, is the reason behind this successful approach.

LG doesn’t enjoy such a thing, at least in markets where noisy tech journalism reigns supreme. It’s great that they do give a damn how their phones look like. But to establish any meaningful beach head, they need to go beyond style and offer functionality. Pretty much what Nokia does nowadays,

Make the Features Better

Speaking of which, you can’t fault LG for putting in too few features. On the contrary! Recent offerings like the Secret and KC550 pack quite a lot within their respective cases. To this degree, LG has copied the put-everything-into-a-phone approach of Nokia.

From personal experience though, these features are lacking because of how they’re implemented. There’s always something just missing. It’s hard to describe this lack comprehensively in a simple blog post, so here’s an example. Since the Secret runs on a variant of Symbian dutifully licensed from Nokia), it’s possible to mark items on any list (think contacts, pictures, songs, etc.). Unfortunately, once you mark them, the only thing you can do is delete your selected items. Why is it impossible to do other useful things with marked lists, like send Bluetooth?

Responsiveness Responsiveness Responsiveness

By far the most important capability of any mobile phone is how responsive it is. A phone that’s loaded with features is practically useless if it takes a few split-seconds to get things done. That unfortunately is a shortcoming plaguing current-generation LG phones. Let’s make those phones more responsive LG! If competitors like Nokia and (sigh) Apple can do it, the latter on the first try, why shouldn’t you?

LG makes decent phones. The point of any business is to make the best, so that when your marketing department goes on overdrive, they’ll have something really great to work with.