LG Electronics said Wednesday it plans to showcase a high-end smartphone later this year that will come with upgraded specs compared with its flagship G lineup, and narrow gaps with Samsung and Apple. "We are planning to release a product that stands above the G series," said Cho Jun-ho, who heads LG's mobile business in a surprise move at the Mobile World Congress (MWC) that runs in Barcelona, Spain, through Thursday. "It will be launched during the second half of this year."

Jun-ho added that the firm is designing and developing its own mobile processor chips to be used in its next generation mobile phones.

Obviously, the Korean company seeks to cut its dependence on Qualcomm for processors. The company has spent millions of dollars to develop processors at its logic-chip research lab.

LG Electronics did not showcase the new LG G4 smartphone at year's Mobile World Congress (MWC) exhibition, amid alleged overheating issues with Qualcomm's latest Snapdragon 810 chips.

But the the G4 -- expected to be unveiled next month -- will to be very different from the G3, mainly due to a major overhaul in surface design (metal-mixtured) and improvements in user-experience (LG UX 4.0).

LG was also said to introduce a fingerprint sensor on its new flagship smartphone G4 in a bid to jump into the mobile payments market, according to multiple reports. However, LG has denied such plans.

Cho Ju-no also said the company would unveil another premium handset in the latter half of the year.