LG unveils a video of the LG G4 user experience

There have been plenty of leaks of the rumoured LG G4 up to now, but this is the first time we’ve seen something official from LG on their new flagship phone. Today, they announced that the LG G4 – set to be announced at the end of April – will run a new version of their mobile interface, called LG UX 4.0.

Designed to be ‘simpler and more intuitive’, there’s a demo in the teaser video – but don’t expect any shots of the phone. We’re not that lucky.

If that oddly-worded teaser didn’t help much (“For your special experience” sounds like the slogan for something you’d find at Ann Summers, if you ask us), the key new features are:

  • Quick Shot – take photos quickly by double-tapping the Rear Key even when the screen is off. This emulates the double-tap camera launch on the Samsung Galaxy S6 and Honor 6 Plus.
  • Improvements to Smart Bulletin, which takes information from several apps and arranges them together to give a Google Now-style overview of your day.
  • Similarly, improvements to Smart Notice, which now promises to give you personalised information about weather and travel by analysing your daily routine (hmm). We quote: “A user who enjoys a game of hoops may receive a notification that says, ‘The weather will be mostly sunny today. It’s the perfect weather to get out and play basketball.'”
  • Manual camera mode, bringing the total number of modes on the LG camera to three (Simple, Basic and Manual). Manual mode “features a suite of modules and options for full creative control that would impress even the most experienced photographer.”
  • Drag-and-drop calendar that lets you take events from social media apps and drop them into your schedule. By ‘social media apps’, we’re assuming they mostly mean Facebook, because we don’t tend to get event invites on Snapchat, Instagram or Twitter…
  • Event-specific albums in the gallery, which group photos together according to the time and location. This could be quite handy for gigs and suchlike.
  • Ringtone ID, which “automatically composes a unique ringtone for every caller in the user’s favourite contact list.” Android already lets you have custom ringtones for different people, so this is only useful for people who can’t be bothered to set that up. Which is probably lots, to be fair.

On the whole, nothing too unique or talkable in LG’s latest announcement, but not long now to wait until we see the LG G4 itself. And that’s bound to be worth getting excited about.

Holly Brockwell