With the relative commercial failure of their modular G5 that resulted in a 800 billion won ($67 million) loss this year, Korean company LG is facing an uphill battle to try and regain lost ground ceded to domestic rival Samsung and international rivals like Huawei, OPPO and Vivo.
To do that, the Korean company is said to be working on a couple of new technologies that will supposedly be implemented in their upcoming G6 smartphone, set to debut in February during Mobile World Congress.
LG is rumored to debut their own payment gateway, dubbed LG Pay to compete with rival Samsung, utilizing their own magnetic secure transmission technology (MST) to do so. MST tech, currently used by Samsung Pay, allows the use of older, magnetic credit card machines as well as modern NFC payment terminals, which gives them an edge over the more established Apple and Android Pay solutions currently in the market.
The G6 may also come with an all-in-one iris scanning module that would be a step up from Samsung’s implementation in the aborted Galaxy Note 7. The Galaxy Note 7 used secondary iris scanner to read your eyes – a single module that accomplishes all of that saves on material costs and would ensure faster performance in recognizing and unlocking phones. And because of Samsung’s Note 7 fiasco, LG is on track to catch up with their Korean rival in implementing the tech in their phones.
LG has a lot of ground to cover for their next flagship. Hopefully the failure of their G5 spurs the company to think outside the box and innovate on new, relevant features for their consumers with their upcoming flagship.
