LG announces 4 new phones ahead of Mobile World Congress, the G4 isn’t one of them

LG may well be unleasing its new flagship smartphone, the LG G4, at Mobile World Congress, but ahead of the March show it’s announced that it’ll be launching four new mid-range smartphones.

Known as the Magna, Spirit, Leon and Joy, LG’s new smartphones build on “LG’s design language to bring optimised performance and effortless user experience to a broader range of consumers,” says an LG press release. PR-speak aside, this means these four new phones, available in both 4G and 3G versions, will be built to premium specifications, but offered at affordable prices.

The Magna features a 5in HD display with 294ppi, a 1.2GHz Quad-core processor, 8-megapixel rear-facing camera and a 5-megapixel front-facing camera, 8GB of internal storage, and 1GB of RAM. It comes with a 2,540mAh removable battery, placing it in a similar range to the upcoming Samsung S6 in terms of capacity. It’s also the largest of the four new phones on offer, coming in at 139.7 x 69.9 x 10.2 mm.

LG’s Spirit smartphone is a little smaller than Magna with a 4.7in 312ppi display. However, it still comes with all the same internals, but with a smaller 2,100mAH battery, 1-megapixel front-facing camera, and a thinner body at just 9.9mm thick.

The Leon and Joy models are clearly the bottom of the bunch, offering 4.5in and 4in displays respectively. Leon still packs in a 1.2GHz quad-core processor like the Magna and Spirit, and features 8GB of internal memory, 1GB RAM, as well as an 8-megapixel rear-facing camera. However, it only offers 1,900mAh battery and a VGA front-facing camera.

Joy runs with a 1.2GHz dual-core processor, lacks the higher resolution rear-facing camera (instead coming with a 5-megapixel one), and it only has 4GB of internal memory and just 512MB of RAM. It’s clear the Joy is really only meant as an entry-level smartphone despite LG’s mid-range claims.

All smartphones will run on Android 5.0 Lollipop, skinned with LG’s interface it usually reserves for its premium-level devices. Interestingly, LG has extended the distance its cameras recognise Gesture Shot feautres at, allowing it to recognise them from 1.5m away, allowing for use with selfie sticks.

G Flex 2’s Glance View also makes a return on all phones, allowing a quick look at notifications with a simple downwards swipe on a locked or turned off screen.

Magna, Spirit, Leon and Joy will roll out globally this week.

It’s hard to gleam much information about the G4 from this announcement, due to the current G3 outstripping all of these phones anyway. However, it’s safe to say that it would benefit from improvements to Gesture Shot and come with Glance View as standard.

For comparison’s sake, it’s believed that the G4 will come with Qualcomm’s octa-core Snapdragon 810, 4GB RAM, and come in either 32 or 64GB of internal memory. It’s also slated to have a 5.3in display at around 554ppi, 16-megapixel rear camera and a 5-ultrapixel front-facing camera. Like LG’s new phones, it’ll run on Android 5.0 Lollipop.

You can take a look at the individual phone specifications below.

LG Magna:

LG Spirit:

LG Leon:

LG Joy: