Samsung had the best press conference, but LG had the best product. The LG G5 literally wowed crowds at MWC and redefined what you can expect from a high-end smartphone. Its launch has rather overshadowed its other MWC phone announcements, with the X Cam and X Screen phones almost forgotten in the corner of LG's brightly-coloured booth.
They're worth paying attention to, though. The LG X Screen is a very interesting phone, not least because it has two screens. I'll run through the specifications quickly before delving into the headline feature because it's worth explaining it in detail.
Specs-wise, the X Screen has a 4.93in, 1280x720 pixel screen backed up by a secondary 1.76in 520x80 pixel panel immediately above it. It's powered by an as-yet-unnamed 1.2GHz quad-core processor and comes with 16GB of storage (expandable with a microSD card) and 2GB of RAM. It runs on Android 6 Marshmallow and also comes equipped with a 2,300mAh battery. It's all very mid-range, and it feels it, too.
The phone is extremely light for its size (no official weight figures are available), which adds to a feeling of cheapness. It's thin, too at 7.1mm. Its plastic body isn't the most attractive chassis I've seen but LG continuously stresses that this is a phone for budget buyers. The processor feels a little bit challenged, with app switching taking a couple of seconds and firing up the camera taking a little longer than I'd like.
Onto the screens, which is this phone's standout feature. The main screen is perfectly acceptable, with reasonable colours and a reasonably bright backlight. Its low resolution is more noticeable because of its size, but it's adequate. The second screen doesn't fill the full width of the phone, cutting off where the front-facing camera is. This means there's not an awful lot of space for anything to go on it.
The second screen is predominantly used for placing shortcuts to apps and is persistent even when you're in an app, which makes switching to other apps very easy. Any app can be dragged from the home screen into this area and dragged off again if you want to remove it. There's only room for four apps shortcuts on each second screen. You can scroll through several panels, with one panel dedicated to settings shortcuts such as sound, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and the LED flash. It's all rather inconsistent, with LG's symbols for apps and shortcuts looking a little unrefined and cartoonish.
There's also a shortcut for screen clipping, which immediately takes a screenshot of whatever you're looking at, and allows you to doodle on top of it. Quite how useful this will be in practice remains to be seen.
The second screen can be set to stay on with the phone is in standby. This sounds great in theory, but in reality its appeal is much more limited. Because the screen is LED backlit and the phone needs to conserve as much power as possible, the second screen is set to minimum brightness when the phone is on standby. In anything brighter than mild indoor lighting, it's almost impossible to read. I had to shield it with my hand to get a proper look under the bright lights of LG's booth. It's still useful, though. If your keep your phone on your desk at work, you'll see when you have a notification without having to reach for it. You could also use it as a bedside clock, which is handy. The second screen can also remain on even if you're viewing full screen media on the main screen, which is useful.
What I'm really interested in is how much the second screen affects battery life. I suspect it will be noticeable, but not massively significant if you charge your phone once a day, mostly because the backlight is kept to such a low level.
The LG X Screen is certainly a very interesting concept and it could find a big following if the price is right. I wouldn't call it a deal-clincher, though: if performance, battery life and camera aren't up to scratch then it'll ultimately be a compromised experience.
