LITTLE ROCK — LG Electronics will launch the Optimus G smart phone this month at an event in South Korea, pinning high hopes on the new Android device to help revive its money-losing mobile business.
And at an event in New York last week, HTC of Taiwan introduced two smart phones that feature Windows Phone 8, the latest version of Microsoft’s mobile operating system. The phones, HTC Windows Phone 8X and HTC Windows Phone 8S, were deliberately named to raise awareness among consumers that Windows phones even exist in a market that is dominated by Apple and phones using Google’s Android operating system.
Both the LG and HTC phones are scheduled to go on sale in the United States in November.
LG said last week the Optimus G will cost $894 without subsidies from operators in South Korea, in competition with Apple’s iPhone 5 and Samsung’s Galaxy Note II smart phones with no service plan.
Previous Optimus smart phones have failed to make a mark in the fastest-growing segment of the mobile phone market. LG’s mobile division posted losses of nearly $895 million in 2010 and 2011 combined.
LG’s mobile chief said the company hopes the G smart phone will accelerate the division’s turnaround.
“The Optimus G is our flagship phone with a competitive edge,” Park Jongseok, LG’s mobile-business president, told reporters at a media event. “We are trying to make phones differentiated from our rivals.”
LG Electronics Inc. was the world’s third-largest handset maker before Apple overtook it in the high-end market and China-based ZTE Corp. overtook it in the low-end.
The Seoul-based company has reduced its reliance on rudimentary phones to bank on advanced gadgets that employ Google’s Android operating system. But its effortshave not paid off so far.
LG Display, which supplies screens for Apple’s iPhone and iPad, manufactured 4.7-inch displays for the G, while other LG affiliates made a battery and a 13-megapixel camera. The G smart phone is powered by Qualcomm’s quad-core processor and supports access to a faster wireless network.
LG also added new videorelated features. The G can dim the video in a translucent layer, allowing users to send text messages or write e-mails while watching the show in the background. It also allows users to zoom into a scene while playing the video usinga two-finger pinch.
Meanwhile, HTC and other manufacturers such as Nokia must convince consumers that Microsoft Corp.’s new Windows 8 operating system is competitive.
“Generally speaking, consumers aren’t aware of Windows Phone,” Terry Myerson, corporate vice president of Microsoft’s Windows Phone division, said in an interview. “We wanted to increase the awareness of Windows Phone by simplifying that message.”
For HTC, a big bet on Windows Phone is risky. The previous version of Microsoft’s mobile software, Windows Phone 7, has been unpopularamong consumers, gaining about 2.5 percent of the U.S. market. HTC was the top U.S. smart-phone maker in the third quarter of 2011, but it now has less than a tenth of the market.
Apple and Samsung together account for 57 percent of the U.S. smart-phone market, according to estimates by Gartner Inc., a technology-research firm.
In a previous interview, Jason Mackenzie, president of global sales and marketing at HTC, said the company did not have a strong iconic brand for its phones, as Apple does for its iPhone and Samsung does for its Galaxy phones.
At last week’s event, HTC and Microsoft focused their discussion on the Windows Phone 8X model, the bigger and more expensive of the two phones.
It has a 4.3-inch screen and a wafer-thin body. Mackenzie said the camera had an 88-degree viewing angle so that multiple people are visible during a video conference call, as opposed to just one person’s face.
HTC’s Windows Phone 8X will cost $200 with AT&T. It will be available on T-Mobile USA, Verizon and some global networks as well, and prices are to be announced for those carriers. The price of the smaller phone, the Windows Phone 8S, was not disclosed.
Information for this article was contributed by Youkyung Lee of The Associated Press and Brian X. Chen of The New York Times.
Business, Pages 10 on 09/24/2012