The LG X Power Review

Final Words

LG's strategy with their low-end and mid-range smartphones has been to segment them into products that all focus on a single feature. You have the LG X Style, the LG X Screen, the LG X Mach, the LG X Max, and of course, the LG X Power. I suppose that the thinking behind this strategy is that consumers tend to value one thing in a smartphone more than all the others, and by providing different models that focus on one thing you can hopefully attract the attention of the consumers who care most about that feature.

Unfortunately, I think LG's strategy has really missed the mark. Consumers definitely do value some things more than others in smartphones, but just by looking at LG's smartphones you can see that they sacrifice the quality of other aspects to focus on a single feature. No consumer wants a phone that only does one thing well, they just have priorities about what a phone should do best. In that situation, a phone that tries to provide a good all-around experience is going to win every time, because a smartphone that only does one thing well and fails at everything else is just going to frustrate the user and drive them away from the device.

The LG X Power does live up to its name if you interpret its name as meaning it has a large battery. In our WiFi web test and PCMark's battery test it topped the charts. However, the victory wasn't always by a large margin. Xiaomi's Redmi Note 3 was very close, and it's a phone that does many things well, which contrasts with the LG X Power that really only focuses on providing long battery life. To me this really signifies the failure of LG's strategy. You can build a good all-around smartphone that isn't really much worse than the LG X Power as far as battery life goes, and better in every other respect.

When you set aside battery life, the LG X Power is mediocre at best, and often a lot worse. The camera isn't very good in daylight, although it's better than I expected when shooting in the dark. The display is not pleasing to look at, with a low brightness, dull colors, and a ghastly blue cast. I don't know why the display was even produced, but it never should have shipped on a modern smartphone.

As for performance, it's just completely unacceptable on the North American model. The UI is janky and slow, and the process of opening apps is painful because there's not enough RAM to keep even a modest group of apps resident in memory. It's the only device I've seen where the DiscoMark launch times were barely any faster when launching apps that could and should have been in RAM. General performance within apps is no better, with the jankiness remaining and the SoC being too slow to keep up with tasks like web browsing and general UI navigation. These issues may not be as pronounced on the international model, but the fact that LG is shipping two vastly different models is a huge problem in its own right.

I mentioned this once before, but I don't think the LG X Power even needs its large battery to provide long battery life. The phone's experience is bad enough that users will want to avoid using it, and by virtue of that it will last a long time by being constantly idle in a pocket or a drawer. In that sense, the phone is really a failure at its one key task, because the phone has a giant battery but nothing worth powering.

I never mean to be overly negative in reviews, but in the case of the LG X Power it's really just a case of there being very few positive things to point out. It's a phone that can last a long time, but the user experience is poor and the phone is slow enough that it isn't plesant to use. The display is basically not usable outdoors, and it has a lifeless feeling to it that I didn't think I'd see on a smartphone again. There are just so many better options than the LG X Power in the crowded sub-$200 market, and some of them like the 2015 Moto G are a year old by this point. You simply cannot make a good smartphone by focusing on a single feature, because good smartphones care about every feature.