Typically, when a phone is sold in variants with different processors, it’s because the device is sold in different markets and the manufacturer has to accommodate for what’s available. Oddly enough, LG is bucking this trend with none other than the Velvet, the company’s pride and joy which it thinks could be enough to dig them out of their rut.
The Velvet is officially coming to T-Mobile on September 10th, and in MediaTek’s press release is confirmation that this particular version of the device will ship with the chip maker’s new Dimensity 1000C processor. This chip should be somewhat similar to the Snapdragon 765G (the chip in every other variant of the Velvet) in terms of performance. It runs at 2.0GHz with an octa-core architecture and five Mali-G57 GPU cores.
But there’s no denying this is a weird choice. Why swap the processor at the demand of one carrier? It’s really unclear to me. I guess maybe the Uncarrier’s 5G network could run better with the chip onboard, and it does support AV1 hardware decoding which creates much more efficient streams for supported services like Netflix and YouTube.
Oddly enough, LG also tweaked the battery capacity of the T-Mobile Velvet. Instead of 4,300mAh, the device ships with a 4,000mAh cell. It’s unclear if this difference in capacity will become a problem, but I’m sure time will tell.
On the plus side, T-Mobile will sell its Velvet for $588 which is the cheapest you can get the phone. Whether saving $20 by opting out of a 765G is worth it will have to be determined when people get the device in their pockets. It won’t be long before we know if this tweak in specs means anything.
