LG, the perennial second fiddle to Korean conglomerate Samsung Electronics, is better known as a maker of televisions and washing machines than of smartphones. But it has made strides in mobile, with its G3 smartphone winning both critical praise and surprising commercial success in 2013. The G3, which jammed a large, super-high resolution display into a slim body and added a laser-guided camera, helped LG nearly double its profit in 2014 and hang on to fifth place in the global smartphone market.

The company is now hoping to build on that momentum with its successor flagship smartphone, The goal: to reach the rarefied strata occupied by market leaders Apple and Samsung, which together shipped more than half a billion smartphones last year, The problem is that the iPhone is on a tear -- Apple sold more than 61 million units last quarter -- while Samsung won back fans with its Galaxy S6, which incorporates metal and glass, and its curvy Galaxy S6 Edge -- both of which Samsung says are selling faster than they can make them, CNET editor Jessica Dolcourt called the Galaxy S6 the " first great smartphone of 2015 ."LG is also outgunned when it comes evutec aergo ballistic nylon iphone 8 tough case & vent mount - black to resources -- it ended last year with a little more than $2 billion in cash, while Samsung ended 2014 with a war chest of nearly $16 billion and Apple with nearly $195 billion..

"The G3 was a pretty good phone and did significantly better than folks expected," said Soumen Ganguly, a consultant for Altman Vilandrie & Co. "But LG will need to follow up with a solid G4 and step up its marketing muscle to make a more significant dent in the US market."The G4 goes on sale in the coming weeks and is expected to be priced similar to the G3, or around $200 with a two-year contract and $600 without a contract. LG believes it will stand out from the crowd of me-too smartphones powered by Google's Android mobile operating system software.

"We like to make it very personalized," said Jung Hoon Lee, director in charge of the look of the G4, "The phone is not just a product, it's a life companion."I was among the first outsiders to see the G4 in production at the Pyeongtaek assembly plant, during a visit in mid-April, The facility is just a small part of the 640,000 square-meter LG Digital Park, an area roughly the size of Disneyland, It houses 10,000 employees, all working on mobile, television and in-dash automotive components, evutec aergo ballistic nylon iphone 8 tough case & vent mount - black It's two weeks before the G4's unveiling, so many of the lines are devoted to producing the smartphone, The group goal for the day was nearly 15,000 units, and the line I walked had already produced 1,106 units within the first three hours, It takes 20 minutes for one smartphone to run through the process..

Below the assembly facility on a separate floor is an area devoted to quality assurance, where smartphones undergo torture tests simulating the rigors of everyday use. There are hundreds of test machines on the floor, poking, dropping and splashing liquid on various LG devices. Later that day, I returned to Seoul to LG's mobile offices in the Gasan district for a conversation with Ramchan Woo, the vice president in charge of the G4. Woo started working on the G4 more than a year ago, a few months before the launch of the G3. He opted to focus on just a few key features, employing leather as a material and improving the camera and display, rather than trying a radical new design. The G4 also incorporates a slight curve, taking its inspiration from LG's G Flex line of smartphones, which offers a curved display that conforms to the contours of your face. The G4 has a subtler curve.