[THE INVESTOR] LG Electronics said on March 8 it will start sales of a new V30 smartphone this week that come with upgraded artificial intelligence features and hardware.

The company said it will release the V30S ThinQ and the V30S ThinQ Plus on March 9 with a price tag of 1.04 million won (US$974) and 1.09 million won, respectively.

LG released the original V30 smartphone in September last year.

The storage capacity for the LG V30S ThinQ and the LG V30S ThinQ Plus stand at 128 gigabytes and 256 gigabytes, respectively, compared with the original editions that held 64 GB and 128 GB. The new devices also come with 6GB LPDDR4x RAM, whereas the V30 and the V30 Plus came with 4GB RAM.

In other areas, the new smartphones retained most features from the V30. The smartphones have 16-megapixel and 13-megapixel dual cameras on the back, along with a 5-megapixel front shooter.

LG said the new V30 comes with what it calls an AI camera, which can identify objects and provide optimized shooting modes to users. Other AI features include the Q-Voice, which can activate the camera, phone and text-message applications through voice commands.

By Song Seung-hyun and newswires (ssh@heraldcorp.com)