As Block exits, Salesforce forecasts it will surpass $20B in revenue in FY2021
When Keith Block joined Salesforce from Oracle in 2013, the CRM giant was already a successful SaaS vendor on a billion-dollar quarterly revenue cadence. When the co-CEO announced he was stepping down yesterday, the company reported revenue of $4.9 billion for the quarter.
During his tenure, the company’s revenue more than quadrupled, earning an impressive $17.1 billion last year, and, as Block announced at the earnings call, the company he was leaving was forecasting revenue of $21 billion for FY2021.
Consider that it was not that long ago (in May 2017) that we wrote about the company reaching the $10 billion mark. It’s perilously easy to get lost in these numbers, to take them for granted and think they don’t mean as much as they do. It’s hard work to build a billion-dollar SaaS business, never mind $10 billion or $20 billion.
Yet Salesforce is embarking on unchartered territory for a SaaS company. It’s approaching $20 billion in revenue for a single year.
Growth through acquisition
Granted, the company keeps growing revenue by making big deals like buying MuleSoft for $6.5 billion in 2018 or Tableau for $15.7 billion in 2019, or just this week buying Vlocity for a mere $1.33 billion. That means the company spent more than $25 billion over a couple of years to buy substantial companies that will help them build their business.
Block took a moment to brag a bit about his accomplishments, including how some of those purchases performed, during his swan song call with Salesforce, calling it a capstone of his time at Salesforce:
In Q4, we grew 32% in the Americas, 28% in APAC and 47% in EMEA in constant currency. Now that includes our recent acquisitions. And at the close of FY 2020, the number of Salesforce customers spending $20 million annually grew 34%.
Think about that last number for just a minute. This a SaaS vendor with the number of customers spending $20 million growing by 34%. Block helped orchestrate that growth and worked with the executive team to help determine which companies it should be targeting.
At a press conference in 2016 at Dreamforce, he discussed Salesforce’s acquisition strategy. At the time, it had bought 10 of 12 companies it would end up acquiring that year. It would buy only one in 2017, before revving up again in 2018. Here’s what he said about what they look for in a company, as we reported in an article at the time:
We look at culture. Will it be a good cultural fit? Is it a good product fit? Is there talent? Is there financial value? What are the risks of assimilating the company into our company?
What’s next for Block?
There is no word on what Block will do next beyond acting as an advisor to his former co-CEO Marc Benioff, who took time in the earnings call to thank his colleague for his time at Salesforce. As well he should.
As Ray Wang, founder and principal analyst at Constellation Research point outs, Block leaves a big hole as he steps away. “If there is no equivalent replacement, you will see a significant impact in sales. Keith brought industries and sales discipline,” Wang told TechCrunch
It will be interesting to watch what he does next, and who, if anyone, will benefit from his vast experience helping to build the most successful pure SaaS company on the planet.
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Grab your ticket: Only one week to TC Sessions: Robotics + AI 2020
It’s T-minus one week to the big day, March 3, when more than 1,000 startuppers will convene in Berkeley, Calif. for TC Sessions: Robotics + AI 2020. We’re talking a hefty cross-section representing big companies and exciting new startups. We’re talking some of the most innovative thinkers, makers, researchers, investors and influencers — all focused on creating the future of these two world-changing technologies.
Don’t miss out on this one-day conference of interviews, panel discussions, Q&As, workshops and demos dedicated to every aspect of robotics and AI. General admission tickets cost $345. Snag your ticket now and save, because prices go up at the door. Want to save even more? Save 15% when you buy four or more tickets. Are you a student? Grab a ticket for just $50.
What do we have planned for this TC Session? Here’s a small sample of the fab programming that awaits you, and be sure to check out the full TC Session agenda here.
- Q&A with Founders: This is your chance to ask questions of Sébastien Boyer, co-founder and CEO of FarmWise and Noah Ready-Campbell, founder and CEO of Built Robotics — some of the most successful robotics founders on our stage.
- Disney Robotics: Imagineers from Disney will present state-of-the-art robotics built to populate its theme parks.
- Investing in Robotics and AI: Lessons from the Industry’s VCs: Dror Berman, founding partner at Innovation Endeavors, Jocelyn Goldfein, managing director at Zetta Venture Partners and Eric Migicovsky, general partner at Y Combinator will discuss the rising tide of venture capital funding in robotics and AI. The investors bring a combination of early-stage investing and corporate venture capital expertise, sharing a fondness for the wild world of robotics and AI investing.
And — new this year — don’t miss watching the finalists from our Pitch Night competition. Founders of these early-stage companies, hand-picked by TechCrunch editors, will take the stage and have just five minutes to present their wares.
With just one more week until TC Sessions: Robotics + AI 2020 kicks off, you don’t have much time left to save on tickets. Why pay more at the door? Buy your ticket now and join the best and brightest for a full day dedicated to all things robotics.
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ShapeMeasure’s smart tool and robotic cutter let contractors measure once and cut never
As much as we’d all like to believe that our houses are built with perfectly square angles and other highly regular measurements, that’s rarely the case — which makes remodeling complex and tedious. ShapeMeasure hopes to alleviate that pain with a device that automatically measures a space and a robotic mill that cuts the required lumber precisely to size, shortening and easing the process by huge amounts.
Founder Ben Blumer, who was exposed to the art of building and repair early by his father, a general contractor, had a brainwave that became the company during some renovations of his own.
“I was shocked to see our flooring installer, who had 10 years of experience, and was excellent at what he did, take over an hour to install a single stair,” Blumer said. “I started thinking, ‘a little bit of technology could go a long way here.’ ”
Finding himself at the time free to work on such a project, he recruited a former general contractor friend and applied to HAX, which soon shipped them off to Shenzhen to pursue their idea.
The main issue is stairs: they’re tricky, and especially in older homes can be pretty off-kilter. So although you know each stair is about 35 inches wide, it might be 35 and 3/64 inches, while the next one could be 34 and 61/64. Likewise, the angles might be ever so slightly off the 90 degrees or whatever they theoretically should be. Painstakingly measuring every single stair and manually cutting wood to those many slightly different dimensions is extremely time-consuming. The tool ShapeMeasure built makes it literally a push-button affair.
The device they settled on is essentially a super-precise lidar that measures around itself in wide arc, and the exact details of which comprise part of the company’s secret sauce. This gives the precise dimensions and attachment angles of the area around it, in the first intended use case a stair. The design, helped along by HAX’s Noel Joyce, looks a bit like a giant Dust Buster by way of the original “Alien.”
Obviously his shirt contradicts my headline, but if you think about the cutting as an automated process rather than something a person has to do, mine makes sense.
“We were working with Noel Joyce, HAX’s lead industrial designer. We wanted a product that looked and felt like a tool. We figured, if you’re trying to convince contractors to try something new, it should feel familiar,” Blumer said. “We spent hundreds of hours sourcing parts and re-engineering our scanning mechanism so that it could fit into Noel’s beautiful form factor. Turns out, contractors don’t care what it looks like. They liked the design, but were way more excited for the functionality.”
Once the shapes are scanned in and checked, that information can be beamed off to ShapeMeasure’s other device, a robotic lumber sizing system that cuts wood into the exact size and shape necessary to fit together as stairs. Of course, the contractor still has to bring them to the location and attach them by whatever means they see fit, but what was once a process with perhaps hundreds of steps has been simplified by an order of magnitude.
The machine is similar to other lumber-cutting devices, but simpler and easier to operate.
“There are lots of automatic cutting systems — often big, heavy, expensive and operated by professional CNC technicians. To cut flooring on a machine like that involves setting up jigs, clamping and reclamping each board, and generating custom gcode for each stair we cut,” Blumer said. They can be several times more costly and difficult to employ. “The cutting solution we’re building is compact, requires no clamping, and can be operated with just a few hours of training.”
It’s not just about length and width, either — molding and other flourishes on the stairs can make complex cuts necessary that would be impractical or at the very least extremely time-consuming to attempt manually.
Examples of complex cuts made by the ShapeMeasure machine.
The result is that the installation process from start to finish is about four times faster, they determined. If this seems a bit optimistic, know that it isn’t just armchair theorizing — they were careful to back up these numbers from the start.
“We take our speedup data really seriously,” said Blumer. “This is our top metric! One of the first purchases I made for the company was a dozen stopwatches. We’ve done installations in the ShapeMeasure lab and on real, messy construction sites — filming, timing and logging every moment.”
Interestingly, the precut lumber made other improvements possible — the team designed a bucket to accommodate the increased rate at which the installer uses glue and other parts. It’s a bit like if you improved painting speed so much that your new bottleneck was mixing and pouring the paint into roller trays fast enough.
Currently the company is working on establishing standard practices and packaging so that a ShapeMeasure “microfactory” can be set up easily anywhere in the country on short notice. And they’re “considering” raising money before then to accelerate the process. Blumer built the prototype with his own money and they pulled in a bit from HAX and then a small pre-seed round to get things started.
With luck and a bit of elbow grease, ShapeMeasure could turn out to be a real differentiator in the contractor space — every hour counts, as does every dollar in an estimate.
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Lerer Hippeau leads $6M investment in Pinterest-like digital asset manager Air
When it comes to the so-called “consumerization of the enterprise,” a workplace tool that looks an awful lot like Pinterest seems like it would be the trend’s final form. Brooklyn-based Air is building a digital asset manager for communications teams that aren’t satisfied with more general cloud storage options and want something that can show off visual files with a bit more pizzazz.
The startup tells TechCrunch that they have closed $6 million in funding led by Lerer Hippeau . RedSea Ventures, Advancit Capital and WndrCo also participated.
General-purpose cloud storage options from Google or Dropbox don’t always handle digital assets well — especially when it comes to previewing items, and Air’s more focused digital asset management competitors often require dedicated managers inside the org, the company says. Air has a pretty straightforward interface that looks more like a desktop site from Facebook or Pinterest, with a focus on thumbnails and video previews that’s simple and sleek.
Air is trying to capitalize on the trend toward greater à la carte software spend for teams looking to phase in products with very specific toolsets. The team is generally charging $10 per user per month, with 100GB of storage included.
“Adobe is an amazing suite of products, but with the idea that companies are mandating the tools that their employees use versus letting their employees choose — it makes a lot of sense that teams are going to ultimately end up having more autonomy and creating better work when they’re using tools that they care about,” Lerer Hippeau managing partner Ben Lerer tells TechCrunch.
Air lets customers migrate files from Dropbox or Google Drive to its AWS-hosted storage platform, which displays files like photos, videos, PDFs, fonts and other visual assets as Pinterest-esque boards. The app is a way to view and store files, but Air’s platform play focuses pretty heavily on giving co-workers the ability to comment and tag assets. Collaborating around files is a pretty easy sell; a couple of users discussing which photo they like best for a particular marketing campaign doesn’t require too much imagination.
The team has been focusing largely on attracting users in roles like brand marketing managers, content coordinators and social media managers as a way of infiltrating and scaling vertically inside marketing departments.
“What Airtable did to spreadsheets and what Notion did to docs, we’re doing for visual work,” CEO Shane Hegde told TechCrunch in an interview. “As we think about how we differentiate, it’s really that we’re a workspace collaboration tool, we’re not just cloud storage or digital asset management…”
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Chicago’s M1 Finance, a consumer-focused fintech platform, reaches $1B under management
Eagle-eyed readers will recall that we mentioned M1 Finance earlier today in our look at a few trends in the fintech industry. We’re back with the firm this afternoon as it has a bit of news that’s worth discussing.
Chicago-based M1 Finance announced today that it has reached the $1 billion assets under management mark, or AUM. Reaching AUM thresholds provides useful milestones that we can use to track the progress of various players in the fintech and finservices worlds.
M1 is an interesting company, bringing together a number of products to form a single platform. Its hybrid nature makes comparing its AUM to other companies’ histories a bit dicey. Still, for reference, Wealthfront, a roboadvisor, announced that it started 2013 with AUM of $100 million, and closed that year with $538 million. By mid-2014, Wealthfront had $1 billion AUM. Today it has over $20 billion.
So, the numbers matter, and reaching thresholds can help us understand where a company is in its maturity cycle.
Let’s talk about M1 Finance’s AUM growth, its revenue growth and its product model. It’s a neat company with a history of efficient growth.
Growth, product
We’ll start with product, as how the company approaches its feature-set helps explain how the service is priced, which in turn helps us grok the company’s growth.
M1 is not a roboadvisor, or a simple neobank, or a lending product; it’s all three at once, providing effectively the digital equivalent of a full-service bank, admittedly in the form of an online experience instead of a brick-and-mortar outlet. M1 users can open investment accounts, checking accounts, get a debit card and borrow money against their investment portfolios; it’s a cohesive feature set.
And one that lets M1 price its products lower as a group than it could individually. During a call with M1’s CEO Brian Barnes about the company’s AUM milestone, the executive connected the company’s long-term vision to its ability to price aggressively. (All fintechs are expanding their platforms, it’s worth noting, meaning that, in time, nearly every fintech player will offer an array of services; Wealthfront, famous for its work in roboadvising, now also offers savings and borrowing capabilities.)
Barnes said that M1 has long wanted to “manage the bulk of [its users’] financial assets, not create a sort of low-friction acquisition hook” to bring in smaller-dollar accounts. This, in turn, means that M1 can have higher per-user sums on its books, which, it appears, helped the company reduce prices on a per-product basis.
Here’s Barnes connecting per-account totals to pricing:
Managing more of someone’s financial assets, and financial life, is going to be more economical. What it allows us to do is maintain lower margins per product, but have enough margin on the entire financial relationship that we can build a very sustainable durable, long-lasting business.
That’s neat! And folks with lots of money expect low fees, especially in the Robinhood-era, so the setup probably helps with attracting users.
Revenue
Summing so far, M1 runs a broad set of financial products, attracting more dollars-per-user than other companies, perhaps, which lets it charge, in its view, lower prices.
How low? Barnes told TechCrunch that his company is “building [its] business model to make 1% of assets we manage [into] top line. So every billion bucks on the platform will be 10 million dollars in recurring revenue. And it is a relatively linear relationship.” The CEO later extended the point, saying that when his firm has $10 billion in AUM, it will generate $100 million.
This means that as M1 scales, we’ll be able to know with reasonable confidence how much revenue it’s driving.
The company charges in the manner you’d expect, with incomes from loaning money, interchange and a SaaS-product called M1 Plus that lowers some fees and provides interest on checking accounts, costing $125 yearly.
Now that M1 is big enough to matter, it has to double, and then double again. We’ll know how well that’s going based on how quickly the company reaches the $2 billion mark.
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‘Konami Code’ creator Kazuhisa Hashimoto has died
Up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A, then start. Sound familiar? The Konami Code, as this sequence came to be known, is one of the most recognizable artifacts of an earlier era of gaming. Kazuhisa Hashimoto, its creator, has used up the last of his 30 lives.
Hashimoto was a programmer at Konami, and created the code during the development of one of Konami’s best-known games of the 8-bit era: Gradius. Anyone who played it will remember the crushing difficulty of this iconic side-scrolling shooter.
Even the developers, it turns out, found it a bit of a hassle to get through repeatedly for testing purposes. That’s why during the porting process from arcade to NES, Hashimoto made himself a bit of a shortcut to make things a bit easier for himself.
He created a special command that would award the player the most crucial items for surviving the game’s challenges. The sequence to activate it needed to be easy for him to remember during his many playthroughs, but extremely unlikely for a player to input by accident. And so he settled on the well-known “up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A” — after which is usually appended “start,” since the code is often entered while paused or at the title screen.
Fate intervened here and the code, which was meant to be removed before the team wrapped up, was forgotten about and ended up in the shipping product. Somehow word got out about the code (who knows how such things transpired in the ’80s — probably it was published in Nintendo Power) and, given the extreme difficulty of the game, its necessity led to the code being adopted by pretty much everyone who bought Gradius.
And so millions of kids who grew up in the ’80s and ’90s learned the Konami Code by heart, though its effects differed from game to game, it generally made things considerably easier. For instance, in the infamous (and still amazing) Contra for NES, the code gives the player 30 lives, which honestly is about the bare minimum necessary to complete that brutal game.
The code persisted for many years and across generations, though it also began to mutate — in Gradius III for SNES the code caused the player’s ship to self-destruct, as if telling them that cheaters never prosper. Even games by other publishers used the code, as a joke or in earnest.
Soon the Konami Code was a staple of geek culture. I myself owned a shirt with the code on it, and listened to a band by that name. It showed up in TV, movies, anywhere an ’80s kid had a chance to slip it in. Even if it wasn’t used by name or with the exact sequence, the code became shorthand for all other cheat codes. Hashimoto had unknowingly created a proto-meme that infiltrated gaming culture worldwide, becoming one of the most widely recognizable aspects of it for decades to come.
All because he found his own game too hard to play.
Those were the days when development teams were on the order of 10-20 people, and the choices of a single person could change everything. These days a cheat code would probably have to be approved and playtested during alpha and beta, and shared with strategic partners for the printed strategy guides well ahead of release.
Hashimoto’s contribution to the gaming world was an accident, but on no account does that downplay his or the code’s importance. He represented the lasting power of an earlier era of gaming and game creation, and accident or not, his legacy is a powerful one.
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Cartesiam helps developers bring AI to microcontrollers
Cartesiam, a startup that aims to bring machine learning to edge devices powered by microcontrollers, has launched a new tool for developers who want an easier way to build services for these devices. The new NanoEdge AI Studio is the first IDE specifically designed for enabling machine learning and inferencing on Arm Cortex-M microcontrollers, which power billions of devices already.
As Cartesiam GM Marc Dupaquier, who co-founded the company in 2016, told me, the company works very closely with Arm, given that both have a vested interest in having developers create new features for these devices. He noted that while the first wave of IoT was all about sending data to the cloud, that has now shifted and most companies now want to limit the amount of data they send out and do a lot more on the device itself. And that’s pretty much one of the founding theses of Cartesiam. “It’s just absurd to send all this data — which, by the way, also exposes the device from a security standpoint,” he said. “What if we could do it much closer to the device itself?”
The company first bet on Intel’s short-lived Curie SoC platform. That obviously didn’t work out all that well, given that Intel axed support for Curie in 2017. Since then, Cartesiam has focused on the Cortex-M platform, which worked out for the better, given how ubiquitous it has become. Since we’re talking about low-powered microcontrollers, though, it’s worth noting that we’re not talking about face recognition or natural language understanding here. Instead, using machine learning on these devices is more about making objects a little bit smarter and, especially in an industrial use case, detecting abnormalities or figuring out when it’s time to do preventive maintenance.
Today, Cartesiam already works with many large corporations that build Cortex-M-based devices. The NanoEdge Studio makes this development work far easier, though. “Developing a smart object must be simple, rapid and affordable — and today, it is not, so we are trying to change it,” said Dupaquier. But the company isn’t trying to pitch its product to data scientists, he stressed. “Our target is not the data scientists. We are actually not smart enough for that. But we are unbelievably smart for the embedded designer. We will resolve 99% of their problems.” He argues that Cartesiam reduced time to market by a factor of 20 to 50, “because you can get your solution running in days, not in multiple years.”
One nifty feature of the NanoEdge Studio is that it automatically tries to find the best algorithm for a given combination of sensors and use cases and the libraries it generates are extremely small and use somewhere between 4K to 16K of RAM.
NanoEdge Studio for both Windows and Linux is now generally available. Pricing starts at €690/month for a single user or €2,490/month for teams.
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Facebook’s Libra Association adds crypto prime broker Tagomi
TechCrunch has learned that $28 million-funded crypto startup Tagomi will be the newest member of the Libra Association that governs the Facebook-backed Libra stablecoin. A formal announcement is slated for Friday or next week.
Tagomi offers a platform that helps large traders and funds easily access cryptocurrency markets. The news comes days after Libra added Shopify, a reversal of dwindling membership after major partners like Visa, PayPal and Stripe dropped out late last year.
We’ve reached out to the Libra Association and have been promised a response by Facebook’s communications team.
Joining Libra means Tagomi will be expected to contribute at least $10 million toward developing the cryptocurrency, with that investment eligible to reap dividends from interest earned on money kept in the Libra Reserve. Tagomi will also operate a node that validates transactions coming through the Libra blockchain.
Tagomi was founded by Jennifer Campbell, a former investor at Union Square Ventures, which is also a Libra Association Member. The company has 25 employees across five offices. Tagomi will be the 22nd member of the Libra Association, according to information from the startup’s press representative, who was apparently supposed to hold this news until later. “Tagomi is joining the Libra Foundation and Jennifer will be the newest member,” they emailed TechCrunch. We’ll update this story following our interview with Campbell tomorrow.
Campbell and Tagomi will offer technical and policy support to Libra in an effort to make the cryptocurrency more safe and compliant with international law. That will be critical for the Libra Association to get the green light from regulators for a launch in 2020 like it originally planned. Lawmakers in the U.S. and EU have slammed Libra in hearings and the press over its potential to facilitate money laundering, harm privacy and destabilize the global financial system.
The full membership of the Libra Association is now:
Current Members:
Facebook’s Calibra, Tagomi, Shopify, PayU, Farfetch, Lyft, Spotify, Uber, Illiad SA, Anchorage, Bison Trails, Coinbase, Xapo, Andreessen Horowitz, Union Square Ventures, Breakthrough Initiatives, Ribbit Capital, Thrive Capital, Creative Destruction Lab, Kiva, Mercy Corps, Women’s World Banking.
Former Members:
Vodafone, Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, PayPal, Mercado Pago, Bookings Holdings, eBay.
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Panasonic is ending its solar cell partnership with Tesla
Panasonic said it will stop producing solar cells and modules at Tesla’s factory in Buffalo, N.Y., ending a four-year joint venture with the electric automaker.
Nikkei Asian Review was the first to report that Panasonic planned to end its production agreement with Tesla . Panasonic has since issued an announcement to explain its decision. Tesla did not respond to a request for comment.
Panasonic said it will cease solar manufacturing operations at the Tesla factory by the end of May. The company will exit the factory by September.
Panasonic employs about 380 people at the factory. Those employees will be given severance packages. Panasonic said it will work with Tesla to identify and hire qualified applicants from its impacted workforce. Panasonic said in its announcement that Tesla plans to hire qualified applicants to new positions needed to support its solar and energy manufacturing operations in Buffalo.
Panasonic struck a deal in 2016 to jointly produce solar cells at Tesla’s “Gigafactory 2” plant in Buffalo, N.Y. Panasonic committed to share the cost of equipment needed for the plant. The joint venture deepened the relationship between the two companies, which already had established a partnership to produce battery cells at Tesla’s factory near Reno, Nev.
Panasonic’s decision to exit the factory comes as Tesla tries to scale up its energy business as well as meet employment requirements at the state-funded factory. The Buffalo factory was built with $750 million in taxpayer funds and then leased to Tesla. Under a deal reached with the state, Tesla must employ 1,460 people there by April or face a $41.2 million penalty.
As reports of Panasonic’s exit circulated, Tesla told Empire State Development, the New York economic development authority that oversees the factory, that it has exceeded its hiring commitment.
“Tesla informed us that they have not only met, but exceeded their next hiring commitment in Buffalo. As of today, Tesla said they have more than 1,500 jobs in Buffalo and more than 300 others across New York State,” Howard Zemsky, chairman of Empire State Development said in a statement.
Panasonic’s decision to move away from global solar products has no bearing on Tesla’s current operations nor its commitment to Buffalo and New York State, according to Tesla, Zemsky said.
The development authority will verify the company’s data, Zemsky said, who added that the count does not include the Panasonic positions.
Panasonic never received incentives from the state, according to Zemsky.
As Panasonic exits New York, it still works with Tesla under a separate joint venture to produce battery cells at a massive factory near Reno, Nev. Panasonic said in a statement that the decision “will have no impact on Panasonic and Tesla’s strong partnership in Nevada.” The two companies will continue their electric vehicle battery work taking place at Tesla’s Gigafactory, according to Panasonic.
In recent years, reports have suggested the relationship between Panasonic and Tesla has become strained. Tesla’s acquisition in February 2019 of Maxwell Technologies fueled speculation that the automaker wanted to develop its own battery cells.
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LG’s latest has an optional second screen and a headphone jack
One thing you can say for sure about 2020’s smartphone landscape: There’s no shortage of options. Sales have taken a dip in the last few years, causing a number of manufactures to get creative with their offerings. LG’s certainly in that boat. It has been a less than spectacular few years for the company’s mobile offerings, but it’s not for a lack of trying.
It’s probably not due to its unwieldy naming schemes, either, but here we are with the LG V60 ThinQ 5G (even more accurately, the LG V60 ThinQ 5G with LG Dual Screen). As the verbose name suggests, the device sports 5G connectivity, likely at a price that won’t require a second mortgage. No actual specifics on that yet, but the company has noted that it will be cheaper than Samsung’s pricey S20, and probably more in line with last year’s flagships — closer to a more reasonable $800.
The most interesting bit here — and frankly, the one reason I feel compelled to write about it — is the return of the second screen case. LG established its take on foldables last year with a standard handset that converts into an optional dual-screen with an add-on case. In spite of having “thin” in its name, previous models were dinged for being far too bulky and thick when folded.
LG says it has addressed that to some degree, as a “new Dual Screen tips the scale at the same superbly portable weight as its predecessor, thanks to the thinner OLED panel.” From the looks of it, it’s still on the thick side, but that’s going to continue to be one of the downsides of a second screen that’s simply an add on. The other being that considerable bezel/hinge between the two screens.
The means the two massive 6.8-inch screens don’t really effectively combine into one contiguous display. The second screen is more effective for things like multi-tasking or using one of the screens as a game controller. We’re going to see similar functionality from products like the forthcoming Surface Duo.
Perhaps most remarkable of all here, however, is that LG is carrying a torch for the headphone jack, which stubbornly (and beneficially for some) hangs on for dear life into 2020. The device will hit retail at some point in the coming weeks.
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