LG’s decision to quit the smartphone business is a big blow to anyone who cares about smartphones. While the few remaining LG customers will be inevitably scooped up by the Apple and Samsung duopoly, the hole the company leaves in terms of innovation will likely never be filled.

LG pioneered now-familiar features such as the ultrawide camera, laser autofocus, rear mounted fingerprint scanner and capacitive touchscreen in mobile devices. It’s also one of the few companies to continue to include a headphone jack, and make it sound better than ever with a 32-bit Quad DAC, on its flagship smartphones. However, LG’s ability to think outside of the box and defy convention is what really made the company beloved by those who cared to listen.

2015’s G-Flex boasted a curved screen to fit the contours of your face, and a remarkable self-healing coating on the back cover that could make scratches caused by drops, keys or even knives disappear. 2016’s G5 was the first smartphone to go modular, where you could snap off the bottom half of the phone and swap it for an add-on accessory such as hardware camera controls or a battery boost. 2019’s LG V50 shipped with a secondary Dual Screen cover that offered a big duplicate display and largely the same functionality as a foldable phone for a much more affordable price.

But perhaps the wildest innovation came from what would end up being the company’s final smartphone release and arguably the most creative take on the second screen; the LG Wing. Consisting of a large 6.8-inch OLED display that could quickly swivel to landscape orientation while revealing a secondary 3.9-inch display beneath it, it was designed to display full-screen video while also giving access to social media, messaging apps or editing controls. Unfortunately it never made it to Australia, and only saw release in the United States and South Korea.

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At its peak in 2013, a time when handsets from Chinese smartphone-makers were virtually non-existent in the western smartphone market, LG became the third largest smartphone maker behind Samsung and Apple. But the years that followed saw the likes of Huawei, Oppo and Xiaomi offer more premium features for less, and become solid alternatives to Apple and Samsung, pushing once prominent brands like LG out of contention.

The recent OnePlus 9 Pro is a good example, offering an experience similar to Samsung’s S21 Ultra or Apple’s iPhone 12 Pro Max, but for less money. It even offers some features those flagships lack — including the ability to charge the phone from 0 to 100 per cent in 30 minutes wired or 45 wireless — which is more appealing to a lot of users than a second swivelling screen.

Despite being a true innovator, LG’s smartphone division ultimately logged nearly six years of losses totalling close to $6 billion, with a current global market share of just 2 per cent. The company shipped 23 million phones last year, compared with 256 million for Samsung. The writing was on the wall.