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LG’s five-camera V40 will be announced on October 3rd

LG’s five-camera V40 will be announced on October 3rd

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LG announced today that it will hold an event on October 3rd to introduce the V40 ThinQ, its next flagship phone and, remarkably, LG’s fourth flagship this year. The event invitation is adorned with the phrase “take five,” which is a little depressing as a product tagline. (It reads a little like, “it took five tries to nail this.”) But it actually seems to be teasing a new feature: the phone is expected to include a total of five cameras.

If that happens, the V40 might be the first smartphone to include five cameras — presumably, that’d be two on the front and three on the back. While that combination would be new, those setups aren’t unprecedented. Huawei included a triple-camera system on the P20 Pro earlier this year, and several companies have included dual-camera systems on the front. This number of cameras allows for some fancy processing effects, but mostly, it just offers different zoom capabilities.

LG has a lot of flagships without a lot of differences

LG has tried to set its V-series of phones apart by targeting them at people who are looking to create various types of media. While that message has muddied over time, the additional cameras could start to restore the line’s focus.

That said, LG still has an uphill journey to make this phone stand out. Its last V-series phone, the V35 ThinQ, was quickly forgotten after launching in June, and it had few distinctions from LG’s G7, which went on sale around the same time. Now, we’re at least a few months out from LG’s last flagship phone launch, but it’s not clear if LG plans to introduce something hugely different. The V40 is expected to have a Snapdragon 845 processor and a quad DAC — both things are present in LG’s last flagships — though it’s rumored to jump up to a 6.3-inch display with a notch, which would be new.