Currently, this ‘budget’ category is dominated by Chinese companies like Xiaomi, Lenovo and LeEco and they are facing tough competition from Samsung. Today, launching a product in this segment is not only risky but it has become a must to offer something special apart from the expected specifications and features.
LG is aiming to capture this market with its new X-Screen smartphone, which features a second ‘ticker style’ display, after the one first seen on LG’s premium smartphone V10 last year.
Design and texture
The 1.7-inch secondary colour LCD display (80×520 pixel resolution) stays on all the time, even when the phone is off, so you can view notifications without having to turn on the main display. Notifications appear as they do in the notification shade. The first alert from an email or WhatsApp appears as a full message, but subsequent alerts from the same app show just the app icon and a picture of the sender. Other alerts include the option to have the time, date, battery level, or a custom message displayed permanently.
The phone’s display is pretty interactive, so swiping to the left brings up the Quick Tool which has four toggle switches for sound profile, Wi-Fi, torch and SOS. Then swiping to the left again controls the music player.
When the main display is on, the second screen becomes more functional and shows you your four most recently used apps, calendar alerts, shortcuts to your favourite apps, and contacts.
We found the second screen on the phone to be quite useful as it is more than just a notification LED. We feel that it would have been better if this display was larger in size as per the main display.
In terms of build quality, LG has done a great job with the design of this phone and it feels premium thanks to the glass rear. The edges of the phone are made of faux-metal but offer a metal-like look. For a phone with a plastic body, the phone has a good finish and weighs just 120 grams. The phone is also quite slim and measures just 7.1mm thick.
The 4.93-inch primary display supports LG’s in-cell touch technology, although it only has HD resolution. At first glance, this doesn’t have any negative impact, but if you look closely, the text looks a bit blurry. In terms of brightness, the color reproduction is good and the phone is easily readable even in sunlight.
The button placement is decent and the buttons work well. There is a hybrid dual SIM tray on the right side which means you can use two nano-SIMs or a single SIM and a microSD card (up to 128GB) simultaneously. There is a single speaker grille on the bottom along with a headphone socket and a micro USB port. The camera module on the rear is slightly raised but it is good that it does not get scratched during use.
One feature that is missing from this phone is a fingerprint sensor. It is disappointing that this extra security feature is not given in the X-Screen. Now this feature is being given in the most affordable smartphones available 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. Just like the LG K10 LTE (Review), the LG X Screen is powered by a slightly older Snapdragon 410 quad-core processor which is older than most smartphones available in this price range today. Apart from this, the phone has 2GB of RAM, 16GB of storage. The phone has Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n, Bluetooth 4.1, GPS, and FM radio. The smartphone does not support USB OTG.
The age of the chipset affects the benchmark figures. We did not get very good figures from this smartphone in the benchmark test. 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 useful 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 needs. SOS mode is a handy feature and works well. Once you have set up an emergency contact, pressing the power button five times will send a quick SMS to that contact with your current location.
Talking about pre-installed apps, the phone comes pre-installed with Google’s apps, File Manager, Truecaller and LG’s own app and theme store LG SmartWorld. The order of the navigation buttons can be customized while Capture+ makes it easy to capture and edit any app or picture.
Performance
Despite the old processor, the phone runs Android Marshmallow quite well. The only issues that are noticeable are when the phone loads multiple webpages in Chrome or multiple browsing through the App Store. App loading 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 heated up even when we took a few pictures and downloaded a few apps.
The second screen in the phone is quite useful at times, but the LCD display gets washed out in direct sunlight, making it difficult to read. When the main screen is off, the second screen dims. 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 doesn’t slip as much as we expected. It is as comfortable to hold as any metal-bodied phone available in the market. The phone plays full HD videos well and the music player has a special feature that automatically searches for the song you are currently listening to. However, the audio quality from the speaker is quite average. The mono speaker is loud enough for alerts but it doesn’t impress when playing media files. The bundled headset is only suitable for making calls.
LG Screen has a 13 megapixel primary camera but you will not get PDAF feature here, so the focus speed is not very good. During shooting, the sensor takes one or two seconds to focus. Photos come out well in daylight. Both the detailing and color of the pictures are good. Photos taken indoors are a bit scattered, which gets worse in low light.
Landscape photos are quite poor in low light, but close-up shots are good when the flash is used. The 8-megapixel front camera can be used for selfies using palm and voice gestures, but the photos 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 burst mode is activated by pressing the shutter button for a long time which works well. The quality of the videos recorded in daylight is good but don’t expect much from the videos in low light.
During the video loop test, the 2300 mAh battery provided in the phone gave a battery life of 12 hours 13 minutes. At the same time, 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 the phone gets charged up to 19 percent in just half an hour, which is not bad.
Our verdict
After spending some time with the LG X-Screen, we wish other smartphone makers would adopt this concept. It’s really nice to have a second screen with all the necessary information at once and switching between apps and features quickly saves a lot of time. The experience could have been even better if the phone had an OLED panel instead of an LCD panel.
However, the second screen alone is not the only reason to buy this phone. The X-Screen also leaves the competition behind with a number of other features. LG seems to be stuck in a time warp when it comes to specifications and features for budget smartphones and these phones look like they were released in 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 running Android Marshmallow. The phone also does not have fingerprint sensor and USB OTG support. The overall camera performance of the phone is decent.
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