LG’s new flagship phone, the LG G6, will be equipped with
extensively tested copper heat pipes that allow the phone to remain operational
in temperatures 15 percent higher than the maximum required for it to go to
market.
The heat pipe system was initially a Sony innovation,
employed for the first time in the company’s Xperia Z2. Inspired by solutions used
in personal computers, heat pipes have since been used by numerous phone
manufacturers, including Microsoft, which embedded it in the Lumia 950 XL, and
Samsung, which included the solution in its Galaxy S7, S7 Edge and,
interestingly, the Galaxy Note 7.
Their application in the latter device was, conspicuously,
unsuccessful, with the devices now being notorious for overheating and, in some
cases, exploding. Mindful of their fellow South Korean company’s snafu, LG’s G6
is only nearing the market after exhaustive testing.
The heat pipe system employed in the G6 is designed to move
heat away from the phone’s key components, such as CPU, GPU and RAM. Through
its testing, LG estimates that the system lowers the G6’s temperature at a rate
of approximately 6 percent to 10 percent.
The company plans to unveil the G6 at the Mobile World
Congress 2017 and expects to begin commercial sales by early March, well ahead
of Samsung’s Galaxy S8 release date of April 2017.
LG has subsidiary companies in Greece and Romania.
