This morning LG announced an update to its curved G Flex smartphone. With a 5.5 inch full HD display and 13-megapixel camera, the concave LG G Flex 2 is likely to be a hit with consumers. Despite its funky and courageous design, the LG G Flex 2 might also make sense for enterprise fleets.
I won’t give you a full rundown of the specs, as my colleague Matt Swider has already done with his Hands On review (link above), but I figured I would use this space to highlight the most relevant enterprise features and why they warrant your attention.
Durability
LG’s “Self Healing” technology isn’t new to the G Flex 2. The original G Flex also featured this technology, which enables both phones to automatically correct minor scratches and nicks to the phone’s back cover.
What is new about “Self Healing” is that LG says it reduced the healing time from three minutes to within ten seconds, which is pretty sweet. This also means you won’t have to deal with seemingly ubiquitous fingerprints - they should fade before you even notice them. Note: this will not fix major scratches and dents, but it will keep your phone looking newer than devices without this technology.
Additionally, LG has combined Gorilla Glass 3 and proprietary chemicals that it says makes the phone 20% more durable than previous models. The phone and its curves are meant to absorb drops and the plastic body flexes just enough to not crack when you accidentally sit on it.
No company wants to spend money replacing damaged devices. You want your fleet to live full and productive lives until you’re ready to upgrade to better technology. These features might help your organization do just that.
Speed
The G Flex 2 is the first phone with Qualcomm's Snapdragon 810 and 64-bit Octa-core CPU. This bad boy can crank itself up to 2.0GHz, which isn’t exactly top-of-market, but certainly fast enough to help get the job done.
The last thing you’d want to do is arm your staff with a lunker that takes forever to perform basic functions. You want them to actually want to use the device. The LG G Flex 2 will be swift enough that your employees shouldn’t notice any lag.
Fast-charge battery
What the Snapdragon 810 processor also adds is the ability to charge this phone from 0-50% in less than 40 minutes. That’s a huge benefit for organizations looking to cut down on employee excuses. “Phone died. Couldn’t charge fast enough to submit those reports.”
Best-in-class smartphones Samsung Galaxy Note 4 and Google Nexus 6 go from 0-100% in 95 and 98 minutes, respectively. So the LG G Flex 2 should be able to stand toe-to-toe with any device on the market.
Devil's advocate
As I mentioned above, none of these performance specs are best-in-class. If your organization needs the fastest device on the market, or the fastest-to-charge, you’ll probably want to go elsewhere.
The allure of this device rests heavily in its incredible display, graphics processing and camera. Most organizations don’t need to arm their employees with these tools.
But because this device seems to have added several features that make it durable and powerful enough for enterprise use, it might be nice to reward your employees with a cool design and dynamic camera.
