Josh Hendrickson
LG’s “worst kept secret” has been its upcoming Velvet smartphone, led in part by teasers from the company. Well, now it’s not a “secret” anymore, as the company officially unveiled it with an initial release in South Korea. The approximately $700 mid-range phone includes all the specs you can expect to find on Android mid-range phones. And a headphone jack.
If you pay attention to smartphone tech news, there’s nothing to be surprised about here. LG may have just officially unveiled the Velvet, but previous teaser posts told us everything we needed to know about the phone—it’ ticks all the boxes for a mid-range smartphone.
That includes a Snapdragon 765 mid-range processor, 8 GBs of RAM, and 128 GBs of storage. A notched 6.8-inch OLED powers the front of the device, and when you turn it around, you’ll find LG’s “raindrop” camera array.
The “raindrop” terminology refers to the camera array arrangement. You’ll find three, laid out vertically (like raindrops, get it?). At the top is a 48-megapixel camera, followed by an 8-megapixel ultra-wide camera, a 5-megapixel depth sensor. The front-facing shooter is a 16-megapixel lens.
The most notable specs are the in-display fingerprint reader (more and more common these days), wireless charging, and a headphone jack. The Velvet also sports an IP68 water resistance rating and comes in four colors—black, green, orange, and white.
On paper, that’s a solid list of specs for the price. Not quite flagship features, not quite flagship pricing.
For now, the device is available in South Korea only for ₩899,800 (around $700), but LG says it plans to release an English-language announcement later this month, so a global launch shouldn’t be far away.
Source: LG via 9to5Google
