LG’s “Velvet” smartphone packs a Snapdragon 765 and headphone jack
The LG Velvet. [credit: LG ]
LG is teasing its new "Velvet" smartphone, and over the weekend it released a video showing off the design and a key spec. LG says this "Velvet" phone is the first of "a new product roadmap" and that the company is "moving away from alphanumerical designations" in its branding. In other words, the LG G series is dead, and this is the phone that would have been the LG G9.
We are mostly here because the rumors were true, and this "flagship" smartphone isn't sporting Qualcomm's most expensive chip, the Snapdragon 865. Instead, it's shipping the Snapdragon 765. If you're worn out from seeing smartphones with sky-high prices, Snapdragon 765 devices should bring smartphones down from the stratosphere while still maintaining flagship-like speed and features. The chip is popular in China and other more competitive smartphone markets, but in the United States, we've yet to see a phone with the 765. The Nokia 8.3 has a Snapdragon 765G and will launch worldwide sometime in summer 2020, and Google's Pixel 5 is rumored to use the chip, too.
The Snapdragon 865 is a two-chip solution, with the usual computer components on the main SoC, while LTE and 5G connectivity live on a separate modem. A two-chip solution is bigger, more expensive, and more power-hungry than the typical-all-in-one setup. Fitting the extra modem and extra mmWave components into devices is pushing OEMs to make bigger devices with bigger batteries to feed the more power-hungry components, and all of that is ballooning the price of smartphones.
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