Lauren Goode

Recent Posts by Lauren Goode

LG Pushes 4G Smartphone Through Verizon: The LG Spectrum

In the smartphone market, LG Electronics has done well at the low end with the Optimus phone, which is popular with prepaid carriers. But the company has been largely absent in the high-end phone market.

Today, at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, LG showed off its new Spectrum, a 4G LTE smartphone with a 4.5 inch HD IPS display, through a partnership with Verizon. The phone runs Android’s Gingerbread operating system and is upgradable to Android Ice Cream Sandwich. It has rear- and front-facing cameras, and captures 8 megapixel images and 1080 HD video. The phone will be available on Jan. 19 in Verizon stores and will cost $199.99 with a two-year contract.

Through a partnership with ESPN, the Spectrum will stream exclusive mobile video content from ESPN in HD.

LG also teased its upcoming dual-solution VMware smartphone and said it would have more details at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. But what we know about the phone is that it will run two Android operating systems on a single device — one for work and one geared toward personal use. LG cited the growing trend of consumers using personal phones for work as evidence of a need for this sort of thing.

We also got a glimpse of the 55-inch OLED TV from LG — another one of the worst-kept secrets in Vegas — and learned a little bit more about the company’s 3-D TV efforts. More to come shortly.

Ina Fried contributed to this article.

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The problem with the Billionaire Savior phase of the newspaper collapse has always been that billionaires don’t tend to like the kind of authority-questioning journalism that upsets the status quo.

— Ryan Chittum, writing in the Columbia Journalism Review about the promise of Pierre Omidyar’s new media venture with Glenn Greenwald