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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Notmyusualid - Wednesday, August 31, 2016 - link
This is truly a talkers phone - on a budget! Can't argue with that price at all.But Josh - if you want to reivew a phone with a BIG battery, that isn't terrible, and seems to be popluar out here in Asia, I'd be happy to send you my < week old Samsung A9 Pro for review (assuming I get it back when you are done!).
Specs: 5000mAh battery with Quick Charge 3.0 (fastest charging phone I've seen), 6" 1080p, 16MP camera, 5MP front, DUAL sim slots, Snapdragon 652, 4GB RAM, 32GB internal + internal microSD slot.
Incidentally, PC Mark work score 5499.
Let me know...
serendip - Wednesday, August 31, 2016 - link
+1 on the A9. It's almost twice the price of cheap Chinese competitors like the Xiaomi Redmi Note 3 but it packs a heck of a bang with the massive battery and huge AMOLED screen.I can't make sense of this LG phone though. For $150, a Redmi Note 3 (again) uses a proper chip like the Snapdragon 650 instead of puny A7 cores that can barely do anything.
Cliff34 - Wednesday, August 31, 2016 - link
This is not the same price range as LG X right? Love the specs though.Notmyusualid - Sunday, September 4, 2016 - link
Indeed it is not.But performance on par with S6, and half the price of the Note 7.
rhysiam - Wednesday, August 31, 2016 - link
Thanks for the review!I know you can't review everything, but I'm wondering whether the ZTE Axon 7 is on your review-list anywhere? It's getting positive reviews elsewhere and I'm seriously considering buying one, but if I knew an Anandtech review was in the works or even on the horizon, I'd hold off for a couple of months.
Seems like most people suggest it matches or edges out the OnePlus 3 in most (not all areas) for a similar price.
JimmiG - Thursday, September 1, 2016 - link
Too bad there are so many compromises with this phone. I was hopeful when I saw it was coming out, because battery life is really important to me.I've always found the battery life that reviewers (including AT) manage to squeeze out of their phones to be completely unrealistic and made-up. If a reviewer gets 8 hours of web browsing, that typically means I'll get 3, maybe 4 hours. So 13.5 hours with the LG X Power should translate to at least 5 hours of actual battery life..
serendip - Thursday, September 1, 2016 - link
I'm wondering how AT got 12 hours for WiFi web browsing on the Redmi Note 3 and Meizu something-or-other. I can get 10 hours with mostly web browsing but that's with CM13, a custom kernel and lots of tweaks, whereas AT got their number with a stock MIUI install. How?Matt Humrick - Saturday, September 3, 2016 - link
We calibrate the screen to 200 nits at 100% APL and minimize background processes. If you have third-party apps such as Facebook installed, you're going to get less battery life. Even just being signed into Google will reduce battery life. We also turn off the cellular radio (we have a separate test for that) to isolate Wi-Fi performance.Again, aside from PCMark, the goal of the battery life tests are to try and isolate the affects of different parts of the system on battery life rather than tell you how long your phone will last on a charge, which is impossible. Each person uses their phone differently, has different apps installed and running in the background, different signal strengths for Wi-Fi and cellular, different screen brightness, etc.
nikon133 - Thursday, September 1, 2016 - link
Without googling around... anyone has rough idea how is this SoC comparing with SnapDragon 400 and Adreno 305 combo?My personal phone is currently Lumia 830 which runs above combo. While noticeably slower than my work phone, Nexus 5X, it is actually very acceptable and smooth. But SoC is couple of years old, if not more.
Just trying to put this new phone into correct perspective.
zodiacfml - Friday, September 2, 2016 - link
It can be fixed by a price drop.And, can't flagship phones have huge batteries? Flagship SoCs deserve fat batteries!
There is an exception for the S7 active but I don't need the builtin case.