LG Begins Selling Urban Smart Watch but G4 Smartphone Customers Have To Wait Until June

LG took the wraps off two long-awaited high-end mobile devices Tuesday: the LG Watch Urbane, available on Google Play and through AT&T Wireless and Verizon, and the G4 smartphone that’s “coming soon,” the company said. Sprint announced it will have the G4 for sale in June. Some 4,000 LG customers will receive the G4 before it hits stores as part of what the company called its largest-ever consumer campaign. Price and exact dates weren’t given. The G4 will be sold through AT&T, Best Buy, Sprint, T-Mobile, U.S. Cellular and Verizon, said LG. Advanced camera features play prominently in the G4, according to specs. The phone’s camera has an F1.8 aperture lens, which LG said allows 80 percent more light to hit the image sensor than in its predecessor, the LG G3. It has a rear 16-megapixel camera and front 8-megapixel camera, said LG. A manual mode allows users to control focus, shutter speed, ISO, exposure compensation and white balance for every shot, it said. Shots can also be taken in RAW format, in addition to JPEG, for later editing, LG said, with no loss of detail. The camera has a Color Spectrum Sensor that’s said to improve color accuracy by reading the RGB values of the ambient light in a scene along with the infrared light reflected from objects and then adjusting white balance and flash color to create images that resemble what a user would see with a naked eye, it said. The camera module is paired with a 5.5-inch IPS Quantum display with an arc design. Additional specs include a Qualcomm Snapdragon 808 processor running Android 5.1, 32 GB ROM, 3 GB RAM, microSD slot. The Urbane LG Watch ($349) uses the latest version of Android Wear, and has a plastic 1.3-inch OLED display. The watch is said to be thinner and smaller than the LG G Watch R without reducing the size of the display or the battery. The watch uses the 1.2 GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 400 processor.