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LG K10 and K4 smartphones widen range around the world

The South Korean mobile giant will juxtapose its two new flagships with these underpowered handsets, both of which fail to run the latest version of Android.

Daniel Van Boom Senior Writer
Daniel Van Boom is an award-winning Senior Writer based in Sydney, Australia. Daniel Van Boom covers cryptocurrency, NFTs, culture and global issues. When not writing, Daniel Van Boom practices Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, reads as much as he can, and speaks about himself in the third person.
Expertise Cryptocurrency, Culture, International News
Daniel Van Boom
2 min read
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The LG K10 on show at CES 2016.

Josh Miller/CNET

Two new flagship smartphones from LG are coming in 2016 -- and they won't be hitting the market without some backup.

The K10 and K4 phones will launch around the world in the coming weeks, the South Korean company promises. It said that Europe would get the devices this week, followed by Asia, the Middle East and Latin America in the next few weeks. No US release was mentioned, nor was pricing for either device.

The K10 is the more powerful of the pair, and comes in 3G and LTE variants. It sports a 5.3-inch HD display, with the premium LTE model housing a 13-megapixel rear and 8-megapixel front camera combination, 2GB of RAM and a 1.3GHz quad-core processor.

The K4, meanwhile, is more of a budget offering. It features a 4.5-inch 854x480-pixel display, 1GB of RAM and a 1GHz quad-core chipset. Both smartphones will run the older Android 5.1 Lollipop, not the latest version, Marshmallow. On Tuesday, LG said it would release two premium phones this year to combat dipping sales.

The company has struggled in the cutthroat phone market in the past year. The company revealed that it lost 43.8 billion South Korean won ($36.4 million) in its mobile phone division for the final quarter of 2015, a huge drop from the $56 million profit the division showed over the same period in 2014. For 2015 as a whole, the company shipped 59.7 million phones, a minor bump from the 59.1 million units shipped in 2014.

It's likely that the two phones will be successors to last year's G4 and V10 smartphones -- two strong premium handsets that were overshadowed by Apple and Samsung's respective iPhone and Galaxy S offerings.