July 30, 2008, 2:11 PM — LG Electronics plans to start adding Dolby Mobile to high-end phones later this year, it said Wednesday.
The two companies have reached a deal that will make South Korea's LG the second cell phone maker to incorporate the Mobile version of Dolby's system into its handsets. Dolby Mobile is an audio processing system tuned to match the processing and audio capabilities of cell phones.
As cell phones have gotten more complex in recent years, a lot of effort has been spent improving the screens but relatively little work has been done on the audio systems. While most phones today feature an MP3 music player it's been more or less an after thought in many handsets, but with more and more people using the function a richer, deeper, better sound could become a key selling point.
LG is currently the fourth largest cell phone maker in the world with an 8.2 percent share of the market in the first three months of this year. It shipped 24.4 million [m] handsets during the quarter on strength from emerging markets and its domestic market in South Korea. But shipments slipped in Europe.
The first LG phones with Dolby Mobile are due out in the fourth quarter of the year. The company plans to build the technology into high-end multimedia handsets.
