Amazon’s Fire Tablets have been pretty successful due to a combination of factors including low price tags, decent hardware, and maybe a bit of lowered expectations for what a tablet can do.
But Amazon pretty much gave up on producing its own phones after the first Amazon Fire Phone was a flop. Instead, the company has been partnering with phone makers over the past year or so to offer a bunch of “Prime Exclusive Phones.”
In exchange for a deep discount, Amazon Prime members can pick up a carrier unlocked phone that comes preloaded with a bunch of Amazon apps… and ads on the lockscreen.
Up until now, the best Prime Exclusive phones were probably the models from Motorola and Nokia. But now Amazon has announced that it’s adding phones from LG to the program, including (nearly) top tier devices like the LG G6 and G6+.
LG’s G6 was the company’s best smartphone when it launched in February. These days that honor probably belongs to the LG V30, which is not available as a Prime Exclusive phone at this point. But the G6 is still a pretty nice phone, with a 5.7 inch, 2880 x 1440 pixel display, slim bezels, 4GB of RAM, 32GB of storage, and a 3,300 mAh battery.
It has an IP68 rating for water and dust resistance, dual 13MP rear cameras, and support for Qualcomm Quick Charge 3.0 fast charging.
One thing keeping it from being quite as impressive as other flagships released this year is that the LG G6 has a Qualcomm Snapdragon 821 processor rather than the newer Snapdragon 835 chip.
Amazon is selling the LG G6 “with offers and ads” for $400, which is about $50 to $100 less than the price most other retailers are charging.
If you want more memory and storage, the LG G6+ has most of the same features, but this model has 6GB of RAM and 128GB of storage. Amazon is selling a Prime Exclusive model for $500.
Both phones have microSD card slots with support for up to 2TB of removable storage.
Other new additions to the Amazon Prime Exclusive family include a $230 LG Q6 (which has a 5,5 inch, 2160 x 1080 pixel display, a Snapdragon 435 processor, 3GB of RAM, and a single 13MP rear camera), and a $150 LG X Charge (with a 4,500 mAh battery, a 5.5 inch HD display, a MediaTek MT6750 processor, 2GB of RAM, and 16GB of storage).
That Q6 is a crazy deal, I can’t believe there’s already a phone with the super wide + small bezels design trend in that price range. I’ve been considering a prime Android phone to use with Tmo digits beside my iPhone and this might be it. I’m aesthetically motivated so the SD 435 doesn’t bother me and the pink Nokia 6 is always sold out.
The nice thing about these Amazon Exclusive phones is that you’re basically getting a sales price all the time. That is useful for those of us who wait for something to happen to their phone before buying a new phone. But if you can wait you’ll probably see the normal version of the phone for the same price at some point.
For those concerned about the advertising, I’ll say that it’s very unobtrusive, particularly compared to the advertising on the Fire Tablets, particularly if you use a fingerprint scanner to log in.
Agreed, I have a Moto g5 plus from prime and love it. The ads have zero affect on the functionality and are barely noticeable unless you just like to look at your lock screen.
This is quite the development. The question is can you bootloader unlock these new lg phones? I know the motos cannot be if you get the ads version.