Both Samsung and LG announced their new flagship phones for the year, and lo and behold, there’s actually something interesting to discuss. First, let’s get the new Galaxy S7 and Galaxy S7 Edge out of the way: even though they look very similar to the S6 and S6 Edge, Samsung has brought back a few things that many here will like: water resistance, and a microSD card slot. In addition, Samsung has revolutionised the smartphone industry by making the S7 and S7 edge slightly thicker to fit a much, much bigger battery and to reduce the camera hump.
The new LG G5 is more interesting. The phone is, of course, kitted with all the latest processors and RAM and whatever, but at the bottom of the device, there’s a slot that you can use to snap on all kinds of additional hardware.
Two of these new accessories plug directly into the LG G5’s bottom. A small key on the side of the phone pops open its lower section, which can be pulled out along with the battery, then the battery is fitted into the next module and that straps back into the phone. The whole process sounds finicky, but there’s nothing flimsy about the way LG has constructed either the phone, its battery, or the extras, so everything can be done quickly and forcefully. And yes, it really does feel like loading a fresh clip into your gun.
If this reminds you of Handspring’s Springboard, you’re not alone. As with virtually everything in mobile today – everything can be traced right back to Palm.
In any event, as much as I personally always like these kinds of experiments, the problem is that generally, nobody ever builds anything worthwhile for it. These expansion slots always tend to kind of fizzle out, with few actually, really good accessories to ever be released. Which, in turn, raises the question of why you would invest in it in the first pace.
That being said, let’s give it a year or so and see what LG and possible third parties are going to do with this. I like the G5 overall, and the expansion slot is a fun and gutsy move (the fact that it is tells you a lot about the state of the industry, sadly).
As always, be careful with these phones if you care about running the latest Android: flagships or no, updates for these things will be messy.
Yes, mistakes happen but you are an editor. Thanks.
Because most of those expansion slots tend to be proprietary (or even device vendor-exclusive) and hence discourage 3rd party hardware manufacturers, and 3rd party hardware manufacturers is the main reason expansion slots exist. But good luck explaining that to LG’s lawyers.
The only such expansion slot that kinda flew was the Compact Flash expansion slot in Windows Mobile devices, which was a well-established, easily-to-license standard anyone could implement.
http://www.bmsoftware.co.uk/hardware/pdas/eopstvcfcardp-01.htm
Well, you know, even the Gameboy had expansion cards (camera, printer, etc) so I guess it all depend on user adoption of the phone. Since phones now hardly last more than two years, people will refrain from buying an expansion that would fit only in one model.
“The Samsung Galaxy S7 devices will be shipping with Vulkan API support on Android 6.0 for offering up higher-performance graphics”
— Michael Larabel
BTW, I absolutely adore the quirky smartphones LG has made from time to time. One day I will buy them all. I bought the Optimus 2X back when it was new (first dual core device), got the Optimus 3D from ebay a year ago (best 3D ever put on a phone btw), and when the price comes down on ebay (in 3-4 years time), the LG G4 and this LG G5 will be mine.
PS: But I can’t share the enthusiasm over the Galaxies after the S4. What is so exciting about them that warrants the 3x price over a new Nexus 5 32GB from ebay?
Edited 2016-02-22 01:35 UTC
Most of the Galaxies are sold on contracts. The buyers don’t see the real price.
I think phones attached to contracts are very much a US thing.
My side of the puddle, now you pay for the terminal straight out your pocket, and the price is clearly known. The operator may give you a tiny discount and optional no-interest financing payed monthly with the phone bill. You can buy a new phone as often or as rarely as you want, and you can always know how much you still owe for your phone if you financed it.
With the terminal clearly divorced from the phone contract, cell service is relatively inexpensive, at some 15^a`not per month for many talk minutes and a couple gigs of data, so it is no surprise iPhone penetration is below 5% and mid range Android phones for 250^a`not reign. There are still some very few fortunate kids do have iPhones, and flaunt them as the luxury status symbol Apple wanted them to be.
Like virtually every other “tech news site” on the planet, OS News now consists on average of 98.6% smartphone-related and only 1.4% OS-related news.
It looks like there is absolutely nothing else worth mentioning in the technology world nowadays apart from smartphones. It’s a sad, sad day for technology…
98.6% on average? It is a sad day for technology when foobar users still don’t know how to handle a basic calculator.
This article was surrounded by articles about a filesystem on Linux and mutexes/mutexi on QNX. The whole tech world seems to be (rightfully) screaming about Apple’s forced unlocking of a secured device and you complain about too much smartphone news after 1 post while the biggest smartphone convention is being held?
sidenote: Nice combination post, but I expected something about the HP Elite X3 in here as well. Surely that has some novelty and newsworthiness in it. (First real enterprise phone)
And “the Robin” seems to have been released. Although I would still say “just put an SD-Card in it” the device is surely different
Yeah, a very rare and welcome coincidence on OS News these days. I just don’t get this pathological obsession with smartphones and the defensiveness of their advocates such as yourself. Yeah, entire world is screaming about smartphones, that is my point. It looks like smartphones are the only thing on the radar in technology world today, and that is why it’s so sad.
I wouldn’t complain if this site was renamed to “Smartphone news”, though. I just don’t like this cognitive dissonance when I open “osnews.com” and get smartphone news almost exclusively.
Also, the fact that my account was disabled right after I posted that negative comment about smartphones is telling something. It’s telling that smartphone junkies are not well in the head and will do anything to defend the honor of their beloved pocket computers.
Your account just got disabled so you opened up a new one and continued your baseless tirade? Your account got disabled because you were trolling, not because anyone here is defending “their smartphone gadgets”
Here you go, the last 20 posts. 2 of them are about smartphones, half of them are about actual OS-News, the rest is about “things to keep an eye out for the future of computing or other general interests”
Samsung, LG announce new flagship phones
Microsoft Lumia 650 review: great design, terrible chipset
ZFS is the FS for containers in Ubuntu 16.04
Implementing Mutexes in the QNX Neutrino Realtime OS
Apple can comply with the FBI court order
Tim Cook’s open letter: we will not create iOS backdoor for the FBI
ReactOS 0.4.0 released
Remix Mini wants your next PC to be Android
Vulkan 1.0 released
Tails installer is now in Debian
Gravitational waves detected, confirming Einstein’s theory
A history of the Windows Start menu
New bill looks to save smartphone encryption from state bans
Android app helps Iranians avoid morality police checkpoints
A big phone works for everyone but you
Linux Distros Don’t Keep Up with WebKit Updates
The Apple Watch got me hooked on mechanical watches
New FreeBSD Quarterly Status Report published
Google rolling out Marshmallow for Android Wear
Microsoft acquires SwiftKey
I love how operating systems magically do not count once they run on smartphones, the most popular computing platform right now.
Trolls
.
This one was just too obvious to just downvote.
There was a time when you did go overboard with phones that got announced and I still don’t understand why the 650 is in this list. But lately the actual content and the comment-level have both risen significantly. Congrats for that!
(now about that HP Elite X3 and “the Robin”….)
Generally, yes. There’s a lot of room for interesting discussions about smartphone and portable device operating systems. But in this case the operating system wasn’t even mentioned until the last sentence, and then only in passing.
The problem with most smartphone tech ‘news’, it tends to read like smartphone hype and promotion with a few critical comments thrown in for ‘balance’.
Well, that’s a new one – usually people complain I’m too cynical, depressing, and negative.
I suspect that comment is aimed more at the articles you reference than your comments. You can only report what is out there, and a lot of other tech news sites do read like an advertisement.
Because that’s were the main OS wars are happening right now.
It’s like asking for more coverage of WWI while WWII is under way.
Edited 2016-02-22 13:50 UTC
Stylistic beats the handspring by several years to have expansion slots. Best part.. the line is still made to this day.
Still think Fujitsu should’ve beaten apple up with a more serious sue-ball for stealing the name “iPad”. :>