You’ve already heard how our smartphone, the Huawei Union, died. Now let’s talk more about the phone we bought to replace the Union, the LG Tribute Empire.
The Outside
The Front
The front of the Tribute Empire looks like a solid sheet of black edged in silver. It’s nothing but screen and bezels.
The screen is totally gorgeous. According to the phone’s spec sheet, it’s a 5″ HD IPS TFT display with a resolution of 1280 x 720. Everything, from the colors to the text, looks clearer and brighter than I’m used to. Sometimes I catch myself just staring at the thing, taking in the beautiful view.
Above and below the screen are relatively thick bezels. The top bezel contains the front-facing camera and earpiece. The bottom bezel, on the other hand, is completely bare.
Interestingly, the bezels blend well into the screen’s blackness when the phone is off. That—combined with the fact that the Tribute Empire is narrower and longer than the Union and our other phone, the ZTE Speed—makes the screen seem larger than it actually is. It looks like the screen extends edge to edge. It’s a cool illusion.
The Back
The phone’s back is an elegant pearl white. It is plastic and removable. The camera, flash, and power button are stacked down the middle, with the speaker grill in the lower left corner. A gray LG logo sits above the speaker, centered over the USB port.
Honestly, the power button’s placement is weird. My index finger naturally finds the button when I pick up the phone, but it’s awkward to push it and swipe the screen to unlock the phone one-handed.
You can bypass the power button altogether using the KnockOn feature. With KnockOn activated, you can turn the screen on or off by tapping the display twice. That feels more natural to me. It’s easy to forget the feature exists, though. I constantly have to remind my parents that they don’t have to turn the phone over to manipulate the screen.
In terms of cameras, the Tribute Empire has an 8 MP one (rear) and a 5 MP one (front). The rear camera is decent, certainly a step up from the Union’s camera, which lacked flash. It’s good enough for Instagram posts, but it’s best for random shots on Twitter or Facebook. And man, I love being able to post pics online directly from the phone now. Meanwhile, the front camera is grainy but not too bad.
Lastly, there’s the speakers. They’re positioned in a line, like a pair of dashes. They’re so-so, sound-wise. They project well, even on the lowest setting, but they start to distort as they get louder. They also have no bass.
The Sides
The sides of the phone are silver. The faux metal makes the Tribute Empire vaguely resemble the budget iPod touch I once owned. I’m nervous about how the trim will age. I’ve already dinged the paint a few times from dropping the phone. Hopefully, it doesn’t flake off like one of my previous phones did either.
The ports and buttons around the phone’s perimeter are pretty standard. The headphone jack and USB port are on the bottom. The volume buttons are on the left side. The right side is bare except for the notch you use to pry up the back cover. There are also microphone holes on the top and bottom.
The Inside
Storage
One of my biggest complaints about the Huawei Union was its low amount of storage. Only 3.5 GB of 8 GB were available. I had to install most of the apps I wanted to use on a microSD card. It was a headache.
Mercifully, I have 16 GB of storage to work with on the Tribute Empire. Even with all of my favorite apps installed and 7.4 GB dedicated to the system, I still have about 4 GB of free space left. Life is good.
Software & OS
The Tribute Empire runs Android Oreo (8.1). I’m still sorting out what’s native to Oreo and how much LG added, but having come from Android Lollipop on the Union, there were enough differences to throw me when I first looked at the system.
Out of the box, there were apps spread across five or six homescreens. It was chaos. There were Google’s built-in apps (G Suite, YouTube, Maps, etc.); Amazon’s bundle (Shopping, Kindle, Prime Video, Audible); and LG’s utilities (Update Center, Smart Cleaning, and Mobile Switch). Tons of crapware and random apps were also present. I didn’t know where to start.
I later learned that I could choose from three homescreen styles. The phone had defaulted to the “Home” style, which “shows all apps on the homescreen.” Hence the chaos. I changed it to the “Home & App Drawer” style, which, as the name suggests, gives you the more traditional Android homescreen with the app drawer icon.
Even with the homescreen style adjusted, I still had a lot of cleaning up to do. I was able to remove more apps than I had expected. LG even includes a helpful app called App Trash that holds all deleted apps in limbo for 24 hours in case you change your mind (I didn’t). For the permanent apps, I could only hide or disable them.
I should also note that the phone has received three software updates thus far. The first two happened shortly after I activated the phone and the third one came in September. The notification screen says they included “security updates from Google.”
Edit 12/12/19: A fourth software update just popped up. This one is nearly 700 MB (as opposed to the usual ~170 MB) and is described as an improvement for “usability and functionality.”
Performance
Multitasking is one of the Tribute Empire’s marquee features. Apparently, these abilities are made possible by its MediaTek MT6750 1.5GHz Octa-Core chip and 2 GB of RAM.
From my experience, the Tribute Empire’s performance is no joke. It doesn’t choke on resource-intensive apps or activities. For example, I can get a code from an authentication app and switch back to a Chrome tab without either window reloading. That was flat impossible on the Union.
Given my happiness about such basic multitasking feats, imagine my excitement about being able to have two windows open at the same time. To get started, you open the task switcher and tap the multitask icon on the app of your choice. It will fill the top half of the screen. Then you can pick another app to fill the bottom half. Later, you can do more tricks, like resize the windows, swap out the second app, or play a YouTube video in a third window. It’s so awesome.
The dual-app multitasking execution isn’t perfect. You can’t use it with every app, as I found out when I tried to tile a Settings window with a Chrome tab. Moreover, bringing up the keyboard makes it impossible to interact with the bottom window. Minor quibbles aside, I still love it.
Battery
The Tribute Empire’s stated talk time is 15 hours. We probably get about half of that. The phone simply doesn’t stand a chance against my heavy internet usage and my mom’s lengthy conversations. We usually have to charge the phone fully by mid-afternoon and partially before bed.
There are battery saving features available. The Extended and Maximum modes make different levels of changes to the phone’s settings to increase battery life. I was unhappy with the trade-offs both modes made to get that extra time, so I didn’t use them much beyond a brief trial run.
Conclusion
I was scared to death when I ordered the LG Tribute Empire. I had never owned an LG product before. I was worried that I had picked the wrong phone.
Several months in, I think I made the right choice. The Tribute Empire is a great budget phone. It looks good and works well. I don’t know how durable it will be in the long run, but the case we put on it should help it last at least as long as it takes to pay the phone off. I’m a happy customer.