Gadgetory

the LG xscape shoe is a budget smartphone with a curved and compact design how well does it stack up next to the growingly fierce competition this is Bailey Stein with Android authority and this is my full review of the LG xscape 2 on the outside the escape 2 displays a design that we've yet to see and other low end offerings LG is making a big deal out of the phone's curve and rightfully so although it is more so on the subtle side while holding the phone it's still a very respectable component of the phone's satisfying visuals the matte plastic rears attempt to emulate brushed aluminum can be primarily described as hopeful and the parting lines found around the headphone and micro USB ports sadly serve as reminders of the escaped whose price tag I also noticed that the back scratches easily as my unit had several imperfections after just three days of normal use that's not to say that they escape - feels cheap in the hand however in fact while they escape - is on the thicker side at nine point nine millimeters it is surprisingly light at 119 grams the phone size lens too comfortable one-handed use and the rear facing buttons are a nice departure from the norm the buttons have good tactile feedback in our position perfectly for quick access with an index finger there is an LG logo as well as some carrier branding on the back of the phone as well as an additional LG logo on the chin of the device on the top there's a measly 1 megapixel front-facing camera to the right of the earpiece the 4.7 inch 720p display looks great with good sunlight readability viewing angles are pretty good as well although you may notice a slight drop in brightness I think 720p was a wise choice considering the escape to size processor and battery capacity on the downside the display glass is a fingerprint magnet despite my best efforts to keep it clean the excuse to manage to collect fingerprints much faster than any device that I've recently used powered by the quad-core 64-bit Qualcomm Snapdragon 410 collect out 1.2 gigahertz the LG escape 2 does perform on the slower side I didn't have any major issues with performance but the phone certainly feels slower than higher-end devices the bigger problem for me was actually the one gigabyte of RAM it's quite simply not enough for what most people use their smartphones for for example just opening a web page can cause the launcher to be removed from memory which causes a delay when trying to go back home if you do like to listen to music and do other things at the same time you're pretty much out of luck as your music will stop as soon as the phone runs out of memory coupled with the Adreno 306 GPU the escape2 is able to play most games although you'll definitely notice some dropped frames and slow load times and some of the more resource intensive games when it comes to connectivity the LG xscape 2 has everything you'd expect 802 11 and Wi-Fi GPS Bluetooth 4.0 and 4G LTE unlike most budget smart phones however the escape to include support for NFC the rear speaker and the escape 2 is pretty loud although it also sounds heavily distorted LG's curved design helps make the speaker less prone to further distortion one set on a table however although nothing really tops front-facing speakers a user replaceable 2100 milliamp hour battery can be accessed by lifting off the back cover 2100 mili hip hours is relatively small compared to other smartphones and the actual battery life reflects that I started my day at 7 a.m. with brightness set to 75% and Wi-Fi on and was able to get the phone to last until about 7:00 p.m. with 3 hours of screen on time sure that's better than what I had expected from the 2,100 milliamp hour battery but it still may not be enough for some users thankfully you can always swap out the battery if needed the 8 megapixel rear camera with flash on the escape to captured some decent looking images color reproduction was fairly good but the photos seemed to lack detail and sharpness it can also take a few tries to get an object in focus which may frustrate some users LG did include a quick launch feature which allows you to hold down the volume down key to quickly open the camera app the camera app provides little control overall but does have an easy-to-use interface the escape 2 runs LG's custom skin over android 5.1.1 lollipop the phone does run Android 5.0 out-of-the-box but an OTA update is available many aspects of LG's skin make a lot of sense then that code unlock feature the pull down to view time gestures flipped to silence gestures hold volume buttons for quick launch customizable quick toggles a clear all apps button and navigation bar settings are all nice additions the og keyboard launcher and lock screen are all also pretty good and I didn't feel the need to replace them out of the box there were a couple of minor annoyances that I noticed as well including the inability to customize the lockscreen apps and inability to change the night brightness feature hours the biggest negative point for me though was the amount of bloatware that came pre-installed on the phone I counted over 25 individual third-party apps many of them coming from AT&T you can't uninstall these apps either which is very disappointing sure you can disable them but they're still going to use up space on the phone the LG escape tube can be purchased from 18t in silver for 179 off contract 99 cents on contract there are also a few installment plans available starting at $6 per month for 30 months it does include 8 gigabytes of internal storage but only about 2.8 gigabytes is usable out of the box luckily there is a microSD card expansion slot which supports up to 32 gigabytes although the LG escape 2 may look like a good deal on the surface it's probably not the best option the positives include a nice design great display and a good software experience on the other hand the performance could be better the speaker is heavily distorted and the battery may not last through a full day of use for some users with options like the $200 Asus zenfone 2 and upcoming moto G refresh I can't recommend this phone to the average user unless you've already decided that your next budget smartphone must have a curved and/or compact design you should really look elsewhere thank you for watching this video and please make sure to give it a thumbs up below if you enjoyed it also please make sure to subscribe to the channel if you'd like to see more content and feel free to leave a comment below finally be sure to visit the Android Authority website for additional coverage as we are your source for all things Android