According to myLGphones, a version of the LG G4 will not feature neither a 2K nor a 4K display – but 3K. If you are anything like me, your reaction to this news will be confusion. While we don’t have many details about the sources of this leak, it has apparently been confirmed true by a poster at hardare.fr that gave some more details on model names for each version of the upcoming LG flagship. However, these leaks don’t point towards all G4 phones having this resolution, but just the VS999 model that is allegedly coming to Verizon sometime this year.
The source claims that the UA profiles are not hard to manipulate, and that all of this could be bogus. They advise you to take this news with a pinch of salt, and frankly, I personally think you’ll need the whole shaker. But nonetheless, this makes for an interesting topic and, if true, a rather interesting development in the mobile industry. While everyone expected 2K or 1440p displays last year, and we expect 4K displays to come sometime near the end of 2015, I don’t think many expected phones to get to such an “in-betweener” state. Reports about 3K displays have been virtually nonexistent compared to the flood of articles predicting omens about the inevitable arrival of 4K.
It could be that, once more, LG wants to be at the vanguard of screen resolution. They pushed their 1440p LG G3 far and wide on this aspect alone, having being one of the first in the game. While Oppo had unveiled its Find 7 phone sporting the same resolution, LG beat them into the market and then completely overshadowed them with their G3 marketing campaign. I still remember the advertisements stating it was 4 times HD and touting the detail and sharpness of the screen. If LG would like to claim this spec primacy once more, 3K sounds like a reasonable solution, given that 4K screens are still far away and the next generation of chipsets will probably not be quite enough to push that many.
Will the Snapdragon 810 that is rumored to be in the G4 be enough for a 3K display as well? If you remember, the G3 featured a Snapdragon 801 that, while powerful, was obviously not quite ready to support a screen of that caliber. The results were pitiful GPU performance benchmarks, occasional stutters despite LG’s alleged optimizations, and disappointing game performance when compared to the more well-rounded phones. Despite all of this, however, the G3 became a success in great part due to this very screen, and it went on to become one of the most remembered phones of 2014. But with this strategy, LG could find themselves with a good success in their hands – just maybe not a top-notch user experience in terms of performance.
But then there are other technical aspects. First of all, the 1620×2880 screen would make for over 600 ppi. LG themselves declared 550ppi to be the most optimal configuration, to get “magazine print” quality. Their G3 was just short of that, but this phone surpasses it by quite a bit. Will they now say we need more? Or settle for that number, and claim that now they’ve finally hit (and surpassed) it? But then they’d fall back on their words next time they are required to upgrade the screen! We’ve covered the Resolution Wars in our article and we arrived at some nifty conclusions. While changes beyond 1440p will not be noticeable for many people, it still has some benefits and there’s a long way to go before achieving a perfect image. But here’s the glaring problem with 3K and 3K in particular: Its use for media consumption will be mitigated by the fact that we have 4K content being pushed, not 3K. By opting for the in-betweener you still miss out on a lot of the 4K resolution’s pixel count, and it makes this device seem a very short term transitory gimmick that will be severely out-upgraded in as little as 6 months.
I personally think this “premium LG G4″ will just be a water-testing gimmick designed to produce some extra niche sales. Luckily everything points towards it being a compartmentalized case that doesn’t conflict with previous reports, as other versions that we knew of before will still feature the more reasonable (for performance’s, battery’s, and upgrade’ss sake) 1440p screen that we are getting used to now. But if true, this would be the first year where major players adopted two resolution jumps in their phones. These developments might not be worth believing in their entirety, but they make for interesting discussion.
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