LG’s six-day-old smartwatch cancelled due to “image quality issues”

The LG Watch Urbane 2nd Edition LTE. (credit: Google)

Late last week, LG shockingly cancelled its latest smartwatch after just six days on the market. LG said the Watch Urbane 2nd Edition LTE had to be taken off the market due to "a hardware issue," but other than telling us "there are no safety issues or concerns with the product," the company left out any further details.

Now we're getting a little more detail about exactly what went wrong, and it seems to have something to do with the display. An LG rep told The Telegraph "For competitive and supplier relations reasons we are not in a position to communicate the specifics of the issue that led to this decision. However, what we can share is that the hardware issue was related to a new advanced component that we had incorporated in the device that had never been used in an LG wearable device before." The rep went on to say, "During aggressive testing over thousands of hours under severe conditions, it was revealed that this component failed to meet LG’s quality standards and could potentially impact our image quality over the life of the device."  [emphasis ours]

LG is being as diplomatic as possible to not burn a bridge with its suppliers, but it's hard to interpret "image quality" as anything other than a finger pointed squarely at the display. The display would also fit the description of a "new advanced component" that had "never been used in an LG wearable device before." The Urbane 2 was the first smartwatch to hit a 480×480 resolution, bringing the round, 1.3-inch P-OLED display to 490 PPI.

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