You can try out Android Nougat early on your LG G5 — if you live in South Korea

By Christian de Looper Updated August 17, 2016

LG G5

If you’re an LG G5 owner, you may be able to experience the sweet taste of Android 7.0 Nougat before everyone else. LG is launching a preview program that will allow as many as 2,000 lucky winners to begin testing out Android 7.0 Nougat starting Tuesday.

As is always the case, there is a pretty big catch — you have to live in South Korea, and you have to be a customer of LG Uplus. That’s a pretty huge caveat, and it’s a little unfortunate that more people won’t be able to try out Nougat yet. Still, it’s totally possible that as time goes on, LG will open up the program to more people — and, of course, everyone will eventually have the chance to try out Nougat once it’s released to the public.

The move is somewhat surprising for a company like LG, which normally takes some time to update its phones after Google releases a new version of Android. Hopefully, it means that LG will be ready to release Nougat to its phones as soon as Nougat is made available to the public. Of course, the lucky 2,000 users who do end up being able to test out Nougat early should keep in mind that the operating system may still have some bugs and kinks that will need to be worked out.

Android 7.0 Nougat is the latest version of Android, and is set to be released to the public later this year alongside Google’s Nexus smartphones. The new operating system includes a number of new features, such as improved notifications, which will now wrap all the way to the edge of the screen; improvements to the camera app; a “recents” mode, which saves the last 7 apps; and a night mode that allows you to calibrate the colors of light that are displayed more prominently. Multitasking has also been drastically improved, to allow users to view apps in a split-screen mode, though some apps may not work with it.

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Christian de Looper

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Christian’s interest in technology began as a child in Australia, when he stumbled upon a computer at a garage sale that he…

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