lg x screen review

Currently, this ‘budget’ category is dominated by Chinese companies like Xiaomi, Lenovo and LeEco and they are a tough competitor to Samsung. Today, launching a product in this segment is not only full of risks but it has become the biggest need to offer something special apart from the specifications and features as per the expectations.

LG aims to capture this market with its new X-screen smartphones. A second ‘ticker style’ display has been given in this smartphone. Earlier, such a screen was first seen in LG’s premium smartphone V10 last year.

Design and construction
The 1.7-inch secondary color LCD display (80×520 pixels resolution) remains on all the time, even when the phone is off. So you can see notifications even without turning on the main display. Notifications appear the same way as they do in the notification shade. The first alert from an email or WhatsApp appears as a complete message, but subsequent alerts from the same app will show only the app icon and the picture of the sender. Apart from this, talking about alerts, you can choose to show time, date and battery level or any custom message permanently.

The display of the phone is very interactive so swiping left brings up the quick tool where four toggle switches like sound profile, Wi-Fi, torch and SOS are found. After this, the music player can be controlled by swiping left again.

When the main display is on, the second screen becomes more functional and shows you four recent apps, calendar alerts, shortcuts to your favorite apps, and contacts.

We found the second screen on the phone very useful as it is much better than a notification LED. We feel that it would have been better if this display was bigger in terms of the length of the main display.

Talking about the design, LG has done a great job with the design of this phone and it looks like a premium phone because of the glass rear. The edges of the phone are made of faux-metal but give a metal look. The finish of the phone is good for a plastic body phone and it weighs only 120 grams. The phone is also quite thin and its thickness is only 7.1 mm.

The 4.93-inch primary display is powered by LG’s in-cell touch technology, although it only has an HD resolution. At first it doesn’t seem to have any negative effect but if you look closely, the text looks a bit blurry. Talking about brightness, color reproduction is good and the phone can be easily read even in sunlight.

The button placement is fine and the buttons move quite well. There is a hybrid dual SIM tray on the right side, which means that two Nano SIMs or a single SIM and a microSD card (up to 128 GB) can be used simultaneously. Apart from the headphone socket and micro USB port, there is a single speaker grill at the bottom. The camera module on the rear is slightly raised but it is a good thing that it does not get scratched during use.

The one feature which is missing in this phone is fingerprint sensor. It is disappointing that this extra security feature is not included in the X Screen. Now this feature is being provided even in the most affordable smartphones coming in the market. With this phone you will get a data cable, power adapter and a headset.

Specifications and features
Now things start to change a bit. Like the LG K10 LTE (Review), the LG Apart from this, this phone has 2 GB RAM, 16 GB storage. The phone has Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n, Bluetooth 4.1, GPS and FM radio. This smartphone does not support USB OTG.

The aging of the chipset affects the benchmark figures. In the benchmark test, we did not get very good figures from this smartphone. But the good thing is that this phone has Android Marshmallow instead of Android Lollipop. The stock interface has been replaced with LG UI 5.0 and it is very functional and easy to use.

The phone has a single layer layout by default but you can switch to the traditional app drawer as per your need. The SOS mode is a handy feature and works well. Once you setup an emergency contact, pressing the power button five times sends an instant SMS to that contact with your current location.

Talking about pre-installed apps, Google’s app, File Manager, Truecaller and LG’s own app and theme store LG Smartworld come pre-installed in the phone. The order of the navigation buttons can be customized while Capture+ makes it easy to capture and edit any app or photo.

performance
Despite the old processor, Android Marshmallow runs well on the phone. Some problems are noticeable in the phone when there is a lot of browsing through the App Store in the phone or opening many webpages simultaneously in Chrome. Apart from this, loading the app is also not very fast. The X screen has the LG logo on the back where the phone feels quite warm. We noticed that the phone gets warm even while taking some pictures and downloading apps.

The second screen in the phone sometimes proves to be very useful but in direct sunlight the LCD display gets washed out making it difficult to read. When the main screen is off the second screen dims. Even when the main screen is on, the second screen remains on at full brightness. An OLED panel would have been a much better choice for the second screen.

The phone does not slip when held in the hand as much as we expected. It is as convenient to hold as the metal body phones available in the market. Full HD video plays well in the phone and the music player has a special feature by which it automatically searches the song you are currently listening to. However, the audio quality from the speaker is very average. The mono speaker is loud enough for alerts but it doesn’t make an impact while playing media files. Only calls can be made with the headset that comes with it.

LG Screen has a 13-megapixel primary camera but you will not get PDAF feature here so the focus speed is not very good. The sensor takes a second or two to focus during shooting. Photos look good in daylight. Both the detailing and color of the photos are good. Photos taken indoors are a bit blurry, which gets worse in low light.

Landscape photos are quite poor in low light but close-up shots are good when flash is used. The 8-megapixel front camera can be used for selfies with palm and voice gestures, but the pictures are not very clear even in daylight.

The camera app is also very basic and lacks basic features like HDR. The camera has a panorama mode and a long press on the shutter button activates the burst mode, which works well. The quality of videos recorded in daylight is good but don’t expect too much from videos in low light.

During the video loop test, the 2300 mAh battery provided in the phone provided a battery life of 12 hours to 13 hours. During normal use, we were easily able to use the phone for more than a day. The phone does not have fast charging technology but within half an hour the phone gets charged up to 19 percent which is not bad.

our decision
After spending some time with the LG It’s a great experience to constantly have access to important information from a single screen, and being able to quickly switch between apps and features also saves a lot of time. If the phone had an OLED panel instead of an LCD panel, the experience could have been more spectacular.

But, this phone should not be bought just because of the second screen. X Screen lags behind the competition due to many other features. It seems that LG is stuck in a time when it comes to specifications and features of budget smartphones and these phones seem to be from 2015 instead of 2016.

At a price of Rs 12,990, this smartphone cannot be called a complete package. Despite good design, battery life and second screen, this phone does not have specifications capable of Android Marshmallow. Fingerprint sensor and USB OTG support are also not available in the phone. The overall camera performance of the phone is decent.