South Korean electronics giant LG has revealed a new tap-to-unlock feature called “Knock Code” will be a key selling point of its new LG G Pro 2 phablet, which the company will unveil at the 2014 Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.
“An evolution of the popular KnockON feature that was first unveiled last year in the LG G2, Knock Code allows owners to power on and unlock their G Pro 2 smartphones in one easy step by tapping their screens using one of 86,367 ‘knock’ combinations,” the company says in a statement.
“Thanks to LG’s intelligent algorithm and advanced hardware, the knock pattern can be entered on any area of the screen — whether the display is turned on or off — using anywhere from two to eight taps.”
The new phablet runs Android 4.4 KitKat, and features a 5.9-inch Full HD IPS display, with a display resolution of 1920 x 1080 pixels, which is marginally larger than the 5.7-inch display on Samsung’s Galaxy Note 3.
The device is powered by a 2.26 GHz quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon processor and a Qualcomm Adreno 330 GPU.
At 157.9 x 81.9 x 8.3mm, it is both slightly longer and wider than the Galaxy Note 3 (which measures 151.2 x 79.2 x 8.3 mm) and weighs in at 172 g.
It will also feature a 3200mAh removable battery, a 13-megapixel rear and a 2.1 megapixel front camera.
News of the new device came as a senior LG official downplayed the competitive threat posed by Lenovo, following its takeover of handset maker Motorola, in an interview with ZDNet Korea.
Lenovo recently purchased Motorola off Google for $US2.91 billion, in the process overtaking LG and becoming the world’s third largest smartphone maker by market share.
“There are many talks over Lenovo and Motorola in the media right now and how it affects LG. But internally, we aren’t discussing much about it,” says LG product planning head Kim Jong Hoon.
“We have a plan to reclaim third place in the global market by the end of the year and have no intention to react on each moves our competitors make. We challenge them with our product competiveness.”
Andrew Sadauskas is a former journalist at SmartCompany and a former editor of TechCompany.
