In a conversation with Apple’s (NASDAQ: APPL) Senior Vice President of Design, Jony Ive, Vanity Fair’s Graydon Carter sat down and talked to Ive about the company’s latest products and even their competitors.

Ive brought up an interesting point when they were talking about how the iPhone’s design had moved from having curved edges, to sharp edges and then back to curved again. Then, Ive started to talk about the iPhone and numerous prototypes that they had made, including ones with large screens. You can listen right here.

Ive calls competitors’ phones ‘big and clunky’ and says that many of their competitors’ devices are in fact big and clunky when the reality for Apple is actually very similar. In fact, if you were to hold the 5.5″ iPhone 6 Plus and put it up against something like LG’s G3, then you would realize that Apple’s iPhone is actually a bigger and clunkier phone, noticeably so. The LG G3 actually has the exact same screen size as the iPhone 6 Plus, but has a smaller body and a higher resolution display. So not only do you get a smaller phone with the same size display, but the pixel density and image quality of that display is arguably better as well.

LG has done a fantastic job with the G3 and there’s no denying that they have. Jony Ive was smart not to mention any of their competitors, but he’s clearly calling out Samsung here since Samsung is Apple’s #1 competitor and still makes fairly ‘clunky’ phones with their Galaxy Note series of smartphones as well as the Galaxy Mega phones which are even larger and more unwieldy to the normal human hand.

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In a somewhat unsurprising move, Verizon will be offering the LG G3 on their network starting July 17th. They will also be offering LG’s G Watch as an accessory to the LG G3 as well. However, thanks to the awesome 2-year contract price of the LG G3, of $99.99 the LG G Watch will actually cost most consumers more than double the money up front.

The LG G Watch (below) will retail on Verizon’s network as an accessory to the LG G3 (or any Android phone) for $229. Both this watch and the smartphone have been highly anticipated since their initial launches a month ago. Details about the LG G Watch have been slowly trickling out thanks to Google, as LG appears to have been holding a lot about the watch back until Google talked about Android wear features at Google I/O.

LG G Watch on Verizon

This means that LG’s G3 is likely going to bring some serious competition to Samsung and HTC who both currently sell their phones on Verizon at $99.99 as well (after originally selling for $199-ish back in April). The awesome part is that the G3 is already coming in at a lower retail price ($599) which enables it to come in at a more competitive on-contract price of $99.99 at launch. Additionally, you can also get this phone on an Edge plan for $30 a month, but then you’re basically paying a ton of money not to even own the phone. And yes, it will be XLTE (carrier aggregation) which will combine Verizon’s 700 MHz and AWS spectrum to deliver more download capacity.

Overall it should be great to see the smartphone companies competing with another and giving consumers really good choices. And it is also good to see that the carriers are also giving more affordable on-contract prices, which may make selling something like an iPhone 6 even more difficult at $199 or even the rumored $299 on contract.

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LG has finally announced their new LG G3 smartphone/phablet. As many had expected, the LG G3 does indeed sport a 5.5″ QHD display with 2560 x 1440 resolution, resulting in a 539 PPI pixel density. LG, however, rejects the claims that this phone is a phablet as they believe that the overall smaller bezel size makes this phone feel like a standard 5.1″ phone. It also has the expected Snapdragon 801 (not the faster Snapdragon 805 we just benchmarked) and LTE and 802.11ac/b/g/n connectivity. It will ship with Android 4.2.2 just like the LG G2 that came before it, and frankly I wouldn’t expect it to run much if any faster than the Snapdragon 800 in the G2 because of the much higher resolution display.

The LG G3 in many colors

LG has also improved the camera on the phone greatly by reducing the focus time to 276 miliseconds, so essentially in 1/4 of a second. They also improved the camera’s optical image stabilization (OIS) by 20% which means that it will be even more stable in taking long exposure photos or when recording videos. The G2 already did this pretty well with the 13 MP camera it had (which the G3 also apparently has). There are also some software improvements in the G3 to make using the LG G3 more photography friendly, but merely in incremental ways.

The back of the LG G3, with the dual LED camera and buttons and speaker

The LG G3 also sports the same battery as the G2 had, with a 3000 mAh battery, however, LG opted to include MicroSD card support in the G3, which means that you can use an SDXC memory card up to 128 GB in your phone if you absolutely find it necessary. Just keep in mind that SD card corruption is possible with Android phones and any data you have on there that isn’t backed up elsewhere could easily be lost and be completely unrecoverable. The phone will come in 16GB and 32GB variants, still without a 64GB variant, which is fine considering that users that really want serious capacity can spring for a microSD card slot.

LG G3

In terms of design itself, the phone is still made of plastic but has a ‘polished metalic skin’ that makes the phone appear as though it is made of metal like the iPhone or HTC One M8. It also follows HTC’s design cues by making the back of the phone curved so that it fits more comfortably inside of users’ hands and simultaneously provides for more space to fit things inside of the phone. This is a welcome improvement from the G2, but isn’t necessarily anything groundbreaking in terms of design or functionality. The buttons are still on the back of the phone, and they are also improved over those that were found on the G2.

LG also completely redid the software on the LG G3, by completely overhauling the G3’s UI to appear much cleaner, refined and simple. They’ve added some unique features to the phone that are designed to compete with some of their competitor’s unlock features. The LG G3 features a knock code feature which allows you to unlock your phone with a specific series of taps. This is obviously more complicated than HTC’s double tap, but it also allows for the phone to be completely unlocked from a sleep state. However, this is still not anywhere as nice as Apple’s or HTC’s simple fingerprint sensor which works with a single swipe. The LG G3 will also feature a Kill Switch, which we’ve been opposed to from a perspective of misuse by security agencies, but you can kill your phone remotely if you lose it or it gets stolen. While many details about the LG G3’s Kill Switch weren’t given, they did say it would allow for the phone to be ‘disabled’, locked, and wiped remotely but didn’t talk about how such features would be managed.

And yes, the LG G3 will have wireless charging capabilities, which means that even though the phone has a ‘metalic skin’ it will still be able to charge and may actually be one of the reasons why LG went with a plastic body and metal skin instead of a solid metal construction like HTC and Apple. Speaking of that, today we also got news that LG is officially the third largest smartphone manufacturer in the world as of Q1 2014, which indicates the company’s efforts are paying off and that their quality products and design are resonating with a global audience. Hopefully we’ll get our hands on a G3 soon so that we can review it and let you know how fantastic that display really is and whether or not the Snapdragon 801 inside of the phone is capable of coping with a 2560 x 1440 display.

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