LG's G6 phone will lose the modular gimmick

The LG G5 featured a snap-on construction that let you attach different modules to the bottom of the phone. It flopped.

Photo by Jason Cipriani/CNET

LG is backing away from what made its previous top-of-the-line phone unique.

The company last year launched the G5, which ventured off the beaten path of phone design: Owners could swap out its bottom "chin" for other parts that added a camera grip or a souped-up speaker. In a sea of similar-looking phones, LG hoped that its unusual approach would turn heads.

 

A fitness watch that holds all your music? Misfit Vapor wants to be that watch

Big, bright, round screen? Check. GPS? Check. Water resistant for swimming? Heart rate? Check, check. Misfit's newest fitness watch looks like it's going for all the features. But yet, after seeing it, I'm not even sure it'll exist in the form I saw.

Called Misfit Vapor, the round watch looks sharp and promises a mix of phone-connected and fully stand-alone functions. It also has Wi-Fi, and according to Misfit, it'll check email and even play music away from a phone.

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Misfit Vapor's weather report.

Scott Stein/CNET

But music playback is limited to MP3s, loaded via a computer over USB or Wi-Fi. The Vapor can't connect to a phone to transfer music because it can't hook into services like Google Play or Apple Music, and doesn't have its own on-phone app store. According to Misift, the goal is to head to streaming music services eventually: maybe Spotify, or Amazon Music. Even the MP3 function didn't work during my demo.