LG Debuts Four New Phones and a Fancy Smartwatch

The LG Watch Urbane. We've seen it before, but LG has now announced the availability of an LTE variant that doesn't run Android Wear, but does make calls without a tethered phone. LG

BARCELONA, SPAIN—Today at the Mobile World Congress tradeshow, LG debuted its latest range of devices, including two wearables and a small fleet of Android smartphones.

Previously announced two weeks ago, the Watch Urbane is an elegant Android Wear smartwatch made with gold- and silver-coated metal. It also comes with a leather replaceable strap that can be replaced with any 22mm-wide band. The Watch Urbane is LG’s third entry into the Android Wear category. In fact, even though it’s designed to look like an everyday luxury timepiece, it has a lot in common with company’s much more sporty G Watch R. Both of them feature a circular, 1.3-inch P-OLED display with 320×320 pixels resolution and 349 pixel density. Both cases house a Qualcomm Snapdragon 400 1.2GHz quad-core processor with 4GB of eMMC storage and 512MB of RAM. Even the battery life is the same: two full-days, thanks to the 410 mAh Li-Ion cell. Further technical details include dust and water IP67 certification, 9-axis sensors, barometer and a PPG heart rate sensor.

Here at MWC, LG also demonstrated an LTE variant of the watch with a built-in microphone and speaker. Using this fuction, users can make phone calls without a tethered phone, or hold push-to-talk conversations between devices connected on the same network. In addition to having three physical navigation buttons on the right side, this LTE version doesn’t run Android Wear. For some reason that confuses me, it’s built on LG’s own WebOS wearable platform instead.

Under the hood, this LTE smartwatch still hosts a Qualcomm Snapdragon 400 chipset with 4GB of internal storage, but doubles the RAM up to 1GB and adds NFC connectivity, to jump into the mobile payments world. The longer the functions list, the bigger the battery; the Watch Urbane LTE packs an impressive 700 mAh battery, meant to last multiple days.

The Watch Urbane will be available on the second quarter of the year. Pricing has yet to be announced—the G Watch R is $300, so expect the flashy Urbane to be more expensive, with the LTE version likely costing even more. We do know that AT&T has signed on to be a carrier parter for the new watch in the U.S.

Four New Phones

In addition to refreshing its wearable offer, LG has showcased here at the Mobile World Congress four new smartphones—that’s in addtion to the G Flex 2, the second-generation curvy smartphone which was unveiled two months ago in Las Vegas at CES and which LG continues to push here in Barcelona.

The other four devices are mid-range smartphones inspired by LG’s older G3 model. They have modest to decent specs, and are meant to offer top-end design at affordable price tags below $250.

From fanciest to humblest, their names are Magna, Spirit, Leon, and Joy. All four phones have LTE connectivity and come with Android 5.0 Lollipop on board.

All have removable batteries, plastic back covers, and all but the low-end Joy have LG’s signature rear-control buttons. First introduced with the G2 smartphone, the center-rear controls will now be included in every LG phone with at least a 4-inch display.

Magna is the biggest one, with its 5.0-inch display, 1280×720 for 294 ppi resolution, and 2540 mAh battery. Spirit is slightly smaller, with 4.7-inch, 1280×720, 312 pixel density display and 2100 mAh battery. Both Magna and Spirit feature HD curved screens, but don’t expect them to be as bendy as the Flex 2. Their radii are far larger: 3000mm versus 700mm. Both of them, and the Leon as well, pack a 1.2GHz processor with 1GB of RAM and 8GB of internal storage, and 8-megapixel main cameras.

Leon and Joy are entry-level phones. Leon has a 4.5-inch FWVGA display with 854×480 resolution at 220 ppi, and a 1900 mAh battery. Joy features 4.0-inch WVGA display with 800×480 resolution at 233 ppi, and it comes with 1900 mAh battery. Depending on the market, you’ll get either a 1.2GHz dual-core processor with 512MB of RAM and 4GB of internal storage, or a quad-core chipset with 1GB of RAM and 8GB of storage. Its main camera is 5-megapixel, while the front sensor is VGA.

All these four new smartphones will be available across Europe in the coming months.