The LG X Power Review
by Brandon Chester on August 31, 2016 9:03 AM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- LG
- LG X Power
Battery Life
The name LG X Power can be interpreted in two ways. You might think that it means the phone is very powerful, or you might think that it has a massive battery. Of course, it could be both, but the phone would probably cost a bit more than $130 if that were the case. In the case of the LG X Power the name does refer to its battery, which comes in at a massive 15.58Wh. This is much larger than many phones that are actually thicker, larger, and heavier than the LG X Power, and I discussed in the previous section the likely reasons why LG was able to fit such a large battery into the phone.
It won't be surprising if the LG X Power outlasts every other device that I compare it to, but I did want to preface the review with our battery life tests instead of performance tests. I believe that the LG X Power's appeal will be to users who need an exceptionally long period of usage on a single charge, but it's not immediately clear based on the battery capacity alone how much longer the LG X Power can last than competing devices. The battery life advantage will have to be balanced against any potential disadvantages that the LG X Power provides, and so it makes the most sense to start off with the battery results before examining other aspects like performance, display, and camera quality.
As always, I'll begin with our internal web browsing battery test, followed by PCMark's battery test. Normally I would also include our GFXBench Manhattan ES 3.1 battery benchmark, but the LG X Power's GPU and drivers do not support OpenGL ES 3.1 which prevented me from running it.
In our WiFi web browsing battery test the LG X Power comes in at the top of the chart. At 12.77 hours it lasts much longer than most mid-range devices like the Moto G4 and the iPhone SE. When compared to devices of similar battery capacity like the Xiaomi Redmi Note 3 and the Meizu M3 note you can see that it only lasts a bit longer. This is important to note because while the LG X Power is a smaller and lighter device than either of those, it's not a great deal smaller, and it doesn't compare very favorably as far as specifications are concerned either.
In PCMark's battery test the LG X Power continues its lead over the other smartphones. In this case the gap between it and the competition from Xiaomi and Meizu is much more significant, and PCMark is a good representation of the usage that a device can provide on a single battery charge, so this is arguably a more important test for the LG X Power to excel in than the web browsing test. In the following section it will also be important to make note of how the LG X Power performs in PCMark compared to those phones.
As expected, the LG X Power does well in our battery benchmarks. It would be hard to do anything else when you pair a 15.58Wh battery with fairly humble hardware, but we've seen stranger things happen with mobile devices. I don't really have much else to say here except that the phone definitely lives up to its name.
Charge Time
Smartphone charge time has been an issue in the past for mid-range smartphones. In some cases I've received chargers that aren't even your standard 5W blocks, and some were only half that at 2.5W. Thankfully we've seemingly moved past that time, and even though the LG X Power packs such a large battery one would hope that the time to charge it isn't extensive.
With its stock charger, the LG X Power takes about three and a half hours to go from 0 to 100% charge. Considering the size of its battery, this isn't a bad result, although the Meizu M3 note and Xiaomi Redmi Note 3 both charge a bit quicker. Given the fact that LG's charge time is similar to the Honor 5X which has a 25% smaller battery capacity there's not really anything to complain about.
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velanapontinha - Wednesday, August 31, 2016 - link
Why oh why do they release two phones with same brand and model and so many different specs?DanNeely - Wednesday, August 31, 2016 - link
MediaTek offers more bang for the buck; but doesn't have the CDMA support needed for the VZW/Sprint networks. At the low price this thing is selling for they can't afford a few extra dollars on the BOM without wiping out their entire margin on the device.Samus - Wednesday, August 31, 2016 - link
Yeah, it's annoying, but because of our carrier saturation in the USA we generally get unique versions (or two versions) of phones. This is one reason why Apple arranged with only one carrier for so many years, and many phones are carrier exclusives.There is nothing preventing you from importing the international version for T-mobile but the LTE bands don't line up so you will only get HSPA+ (which isn't a bad thing on T-mob) however, I'd be surprised if the performance difference between these two models is even relevant, both SoC's are bottom barrel and will be outperformed by SoC's from years ago. The .5GB difference is probably more relevant, and both camera sensors suck so the pixel difference is a wash.
psyside1 - Wednesday, August 31, 2016 - link
Opens article.See MT6753
Close article.
WPX00 - Friday, September 2, 2016 - link
It's not even MT6753. The 53 is an octa-core chip. This is the MT6735 with a quad-core chip.okp11 - Tuesday, October 4, 2016 - link
Based off of the LG and Sprint site it looks like this is a completely different phone then what is listed for sale by them.The Sprint site lists the X Power as an LS755, which has a MediaTek 1.8 GHz Octa-Core MT6755M and 2GB of RAM.
The LG site also has a spec sheet for the Cricket and U.S. Cellular versions of the phones under the names K450 and US610. These both use quad core Snapdragon processors and 1.5GB of RAM...So it appears that almost everything negative about this phone is only applicable to those carriers, not Sprint or Boost's versions.
Very disappointed that none of this was mentioned anywhere in the review, as I'm sure the largest market for this phone will be people on Sprint, which is offering a vastly different set of specs under the same moniker.
jgarcows - Wednesday, August 31, 2016 - link
Thank you for reviewing a sub-$200 phone. They aren't as flashy, but this is the price point a lot of us want to shop at. Please do more reviews like this. I would be especially interested in some handsets with smaller screens.Teknobug - Wednesday, August 31, 2016 - link
Wow all the hardware skimped out but has a huge 4100mAh battery? Most top end phones barely has a 2800mAh.zeeBomb - Wednesday, August 31, 2016 - link
The NA version is a slap in the face tho. You're getting smartwatch power/Cortex A7 on a device like this where a 410 would be just as good as the mediatek version...okay display for a budget phone but sluggish performance. If it wasn't for the battery, this phone would easily be forgotten. Also the call quality is pretty abysmal too.DanNeely - Wednesday, August 31, 2016 - link
"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,"Potentially I see this as a valid strategy; but at a slightly higher pricepoint. Instead of adding a single halo feature to a phone that does everything badly to hit an ultralow pricepoint, use something like the Moto G - which does everything adequately - and add the halo feature to that instead.