For its next flagship, LG will be focusing on gesture-based navigation. At least that's what the company's latest Mobile World Congress 2019 teaser suggests. There's literally a slide that reads "Goodbye Touch," followed by a hand that wipes it away.
The title of the video includes the name "LG Premiere" which may or may not be the official name of LG's forthcoming flagship. However, that title could merely be alluding to a "premiere" LG is going to do at the MWC. That means this might just be a case of semantic confusion.
LG Premiere
Anyway, MWC is due sometime in February, so people won't be waiting for much longer. As the video suggests, LG could be experimenting with contactless gesture-based navigation, as signified by the hand not touching the surface where the "Goodbye Touch" text is but still being able to interact with it somehow. Beyond that, however, the video offers very little else to glean from.
That being said, LG is obviously not going to get rid of touchscreens entirely, which is a ridiculous notion, to be sure. Rather, the company might be adding some sort of Leap Motion style gesture interface to the handset as a form of alternative navigation. Touch-based control will most definitely still be a main part of using the device, in short.
Smartphone Gestures
As TechCrunch puts it, the idea looks terribly gimmicky. But really, who can blame LG? It's hard to stand out in the smartphone world these days, what with everything being so excellent already, from the cameras to the design to the battery to the other niceties, just to name a few.
In fact, smartphones are so great that there's less and less people upgrading every year, which poses a huge challenge to manufacturers who want to make bank annually over upgrades. Smartphones need something else entirely. They need the next great innovation, and chances are foldable displays are the way forward.
Lots of companies are dipping their toes in this pool, most prominently Samsung. It's expected to fully unveil its foldable Galaxy smartphone sometime this year, a phone that will likely disrupt the entire market provided it becomes a hit.
Gesture-based control will likely be seen a gimmick and stay as such, unless LG has interesting things to show once MWC rolls around. Even so, it's hard to bet on gestures as the next big thing in smartphones, but it's a nice attempt on LG's part to stand out from the rest.
