LG’s smartphone division has not met with success in a long time now. The company’s mobile division has been posting losses for over two years now, with its last four major flagships — LG V30, V20, G5, and G6 — all failing to set the sales chart on fire. With MWC fast approaching, LG is expected to unveil its revamped 2018 flagship — the G7 — at the event.

However, it looks like that might not be the case. LG has already confirmed that it is moving away from a yearly release cycle for its smartphone and will instead continue to support its existing models for a longer period of time by releasing additional variants from time to time. Now, a new report suggests that LG Electronics CEO Jo Seong-jin has taken a pretty drastic step and told the team behind the G7 to stop working on the existing model and rethink it from scratch. The move comes after the company struggled to come up with a strong selling point internally.

It is unlikely what this means for the G7 now. A complete rethink so late in the development cycle means the G7 will not launch at MWC 2018 in February and will possibly see a delayed launch in April. Even then, a delay of two months is unlikely to be enough for the G7 team to come up with a new model from scratch.

“Right after the vice chairman made the announcement at the Consumer Electronics Show last week, a direct order was sent down to the working-level officials to start over,” the official told The Korea Herald. “A new decision on a possible launch date will be released around the Lunar New Year holiday next month,” he said. The smartphone was initially expected to be unveiled at the end of February and launched in March.

Our Take

With two months of additional time, the G7 team at LG will only be able to make some minor tweaks and enhancements to the overall design and features of the handset. Any radical design or component change will likely lead to the handset’s launch being delayed by at least a few months at best. A delayed G7 launch means that LG would likely also delay the launch of its V series flagship which it usually launches in the second half of the year. Or the company could just end up merging the two flagships into one with a delayed launch this year.

What do you think? Do LG’s flagship smartphones excite you like before? Or you don’t find them impressive enough?