The last time I fully road tested a smartphone, I was moving from a rather decrepit Samsung Galaxy S2 to the 'glorious' 6-inch HTC One max, at a time when my smartphone use case consisted of taking pictures and basic gaming. Two years on, and I'm upgrading again, because the One max has become frightfully slow and I now use my phone a lot for writing reviews on the road. My phone of choice for this next round comes from a whimsical tale but is an obscure number, from a Chinese company based in Shenzhen called CUBOT.
My search for a smartphone to replace the One max has taken the best part of a few months, on and off. The drive to an upgrade came from a number of factors - the phone was a PVT sample, which means I was stuck on Android 4.3. The camera suffered from the famous 'purple haze' effect that was a result of damaged signal amplifiers in the early HTC One models from the Zoe software. Also the way I used my phone, due to new apps in my repertoire like Evernote, meant that I used my phone as a device to write on when travelling. Mixing Evernote and Swype in a six-inch device meant that those 15-20 minute bus or underground metro trips into London's center now becomes part of my work hours during the day. For this, the One max had little to fault, apart from the low memory causing slow app switching and a slowly decreasing battery life with the inability to enter a 'super-duper low power mode' to get an extra 20 minutes or so. It turns out that a high resolution, a 'high' minimum brightne ss setting and black text on a white background isn't good for battery life. After 18 months as my daily driver, it was getting slow. My phone use had become a lot more multitasking oriented, requiring 3 or 4 apps to be open and quickly switched between (checking data, spec sheets, my results spreadsheets, managing images).
Samsung Galaxy S2 and HTC One Max, My Previous Devices
Now the phone isn't the best place to multitask like a desktop - even a tablet or the iPad Pro works best when only one or two apps are in use. But when you start upping the number, especially with browser tabs, it helps to have a responsive device with a lot of memory so you lose less time switching. This is where having only 1 GB of RAM became a limiting factor, as well as older eMMC for storage, and the decreasing battery life makes a change inevitable, even if the large 6-inch device structure was now my platform of choice. There's also the factor of the old Android version, and not benefitting from the latest updates. Admittedly it was suggested that I should just do a factory reset, or flash an Android update, however I decided to do the regular user thing and upgrade - I have felt uncomfortable using flashing tools on a personal device before, much in the same way that some users feel uncomfortable flashing a BIOS without vendor software. But it was time to get a new devic e for the combined set of reasons.
So the search began around Computex / June time. Now one thing to point out is that I'm a bit of a miser when it comes to phones. I have no qualms spending £400 on a graphics card, but anything over £200 for a phone I find somewhat excessive, especially when I already have a SIM-only plan at £16/month that gives unlimited minutes, texts and 3G data with unlimited tethering. That moves me away from any contract plan to start.
One of the devices at the time that was well on my radar at that price range was the OnePlus One, touted as being a giant killer; however I was unwilling to justify the price outlay or time to invest into the ecosystem if I had issues. Also, it was a bit old at this point, and I was hearing musings of the OnePlus 2 with an S810, so my interest in that was (admittedly, presumptuous and subjective) waning. ASUS' Zenfone 2 was top of my list at this time - it offered a 4GB/64GB device that was a little beyond my price range but I was willing to make an extra investment, but I was a little concerned battery wise from reports. After hearing that a 128GB model was released in India I instantly onto the phone with my ASUS US PR contact about if it was heading to the US shores and at what price. After being told that the Zenfone 2 Deluxe 128GB was coming, and being led along for a couple of months, I was disappointed when I was told they wouldn't have any in stock. I then started looking again.
So through the search, one of the big things I ended up deciding was quite important in a smartphone is battery life, and I wanted something that would last more than a day or two. I do typically carry a battery pack, but this just becomes an extra thing I have to remember to charge and carry around. Either a large battery or an efficient design, coupled with a mid-to-high end SoC and a decent amount of DRAM would have been icing on the cake. Of course, asking for all of this for £200 is pretty much impossible, but I did hope. Of course, GSMArena became a great place to search for battery size, and I was soon pointed to the Gionee Marathon range. As the name implies, Marathon for large battery was a plus. But nothing really stood out, with most offering few hardware plus points or the only option to purchase was through eBay imports, which have their own implications.
Cubot H1
Then when looking at one of the Gionee smartphones on Amazon, the recommended list came up with the CUBOT H1, advertised as having 5200 mAh of battery (compared to 1510 mAh in the iPhone 5c or 2500-3000 mAh in most high end devices). I read through the specifications - the 5.5-inch display was a plus, the 1280x720 resolution was low (but arguably a good idea for long battery life) and it came with Android 5.1. It listed as 2GB/16GB for DRAM/storage, which wasn't great, but certainly an upgrade, and the MediaTek quad-core A53 at 1 GHz didn't fill me with hope compared to the quad-core Krait 300 at 1.7 GHz that was in the One max. It also features a removable battery, dual SIM support (something which I've wanted due to more business trips this year) and microSD support separate to the dual SIM. One element did jump out on the page, aside from the battery life, was the price. For a 5.5-inch 720p smartphone, it was being sold for £125 ($160 equivalent pre-tax).
Obviously the smartphone for that price would cut some corners - aside from the SoC being one of those 'super-mid' processors MediaTek talks about, the body is plastic, and only one of the SIM slots is LTE Cat 4, the other is GSM only. The cameras are pretty basic as well, and the Wi-Fi is only single stream 802.11n which is usually cause for concern. For dimensions, it is slightly deeper than other smartphones (9.2 mm compared to the usual glut of 6.7-7.8 mm), and it also comes at 201g for weight due to the battery, but surprisingly less than the HTC One max which was 217g. It is also worth talking about the microSD support, which is only up to 32GB and is typically not listed on the specification sheets.
CUBOT H1 SoC Mediatek MT6735P4x ARM Cortex-A53 at 977 MHzARM Mali-T720 MP2 at 400 MHz RAM 2GB LPDDR3 at 533 MHz Storage 16GB NAND Display 5.5" 720p IPS Modem 2G / 3G / 4G LTE UE Category 4DC-HSPA+, TD-SCDMA, CDMA2000 1x/EVDO Rev. A, EDGE Networks TDD LTE None FDD LTE B1 / B3 / B7 / B20 UMTS 900 / 1900 / 2100 GSM 850 / 900 / 1800 / 1900 Dimensions 154.5 (h) x 76.6 (w) x 9.2 (d) mm,201 grams*Weight Measured by AnandTech, conflicting numbers online Cameras Rear 12.8MP ( 4128 x 3096 ) Front 8MP ( 3264 x 2448 ) Battery 5200 mAh (19.76 Whr) OS Android 5.1 Connectivity 802.11a/b/g/n 2.4GHzBT 4.0, GPS, A-GPS, Micro-USB SIM Size Micro-SIM (FDD-LTE, WCDMA, GSM)Nano-SIM (GSM Only)Also Separate MicroSD slot, up to 32GB MSRP (UK) 16GB $160 £125 as purchasedNevertheless, forking over my hard earned was a simple enough choice. The biggest concern at the price was probably the screen, and if 1280x720 would be a high enough resolution for me to work on, or if the color accuracy would be sufficient for normal content consumption. So if the display was over saturated with blue (it isn't, but as an example) then it would be quickly dismissed. One factor that was mentioned between others was the battery, and some colleagues expressed concern that it was probably a cheap design that would fail in three months. That being said, spare batteries should be cheap, and if I break it completely then I could by a whole new one and still be in pocket compared to the high end Zenfone 2.
Color options on the Amazon third party seller were listed as black, white or glod (sic). I naturally went for glod.
In The BoxMost smartphone boxes are pretty basic, and this was no exception, but was at least a proper retail box and not some basic cardboard thing. Aside from the H1 smartphone there was also a simple plastic silicone case, with holes for the rear camera and speakers, as well as a pre-applied screen protector on the front with a second one in the box. Aside from this is a wall wart and a USB-A to micro-USB cable for using the H1 as a battery pack to charge other devices.
At a quick glance, it kind of looks high end premium, especially in gold. I had a few people who I met at the SC15 conference ask if it was an iPhone, though anyone who plays with iPhones will know that with at least a moments glance, this is not one. Nevertheless, it requires more than a momentary glance to spot the differences.
At 9.2mm thick, it is not that noticeable in most situations compared to the array of 7mm devices. Truth be told though, combined with the 5.5 inch screen it is slightly too big for my 5ft 6 frame to text in one hand comfortably.
The rear is slightly raised for the camera, and the flash underneath is a simple LED affair. The rear cover feel obviously plastic, with a patterned cross hatch finish, but as I've used the phone with the silicone case pretty much the whole time, I get the sense that I'm using it with a protective case rather than the constant feel of plastic. The rear speaker grille is a series of holes at the bottom here, but the speaker is off center to the right hand side, which the silicone case leaves an opening for.
The front of the phone has one of my current requirements for a smartphone - fixed buttons for menu, home and back, with a long press of home giving the apps list. These light up when touched, aiding low light situations.
The display as mentioned is a 1280x720 affair, with no viewing angle issues. Most of the time I have it in the lower brightness setting unless I am outside in the sun (which is no danger for the UK in autumn and winter). Despite the lower resolution than my previous HTC One max, and the smaller screen size, I can barely tell any difference in sharpness or quality due to the reduced PPI (369 to 267). While I absolutely see the use case for high PPI devices when using a complex character set (Chinese, Japanese), it would seem that it might be a lost battle on my monolingual testing, especially if it gives better battery life.
The screen comes with a pre-applied protector, and mine was placed on pretty much perfectly out of the box. I did spot one small air pocket in the top corner, which only got worse when I tried to fix it. The sticky undercoating gets dust and dirt on it quite quick, so now it's pretty obvious where the screen protector is in that corner. There's another protector in the box, should it need to be replaced.
There is one small niggle with the display. As I have typed up a good chunk of several reviews on it over the month (using Evernote + Swype), it is easy to notice areas on the bottom of this unit which aren't picked up properly by the touchscreen. In this case, the A button registers correctly about 90% of the time, which moves down to ten percent when I'm also pressing shift. This is very noticeable as the other buttons have had a 99.9-100% success rate. I haven't noticed this issue elsewhere on the screen, so I can only put it down to a slightly faulty touch display that also passed QA for Cubot.
The top of the screen shows the ear piece for calls, two light sensors and the front facing 5MP camera. On the right hand side is a notification sensor which glows red when charging or flashes blue when a notification is present. The light for this is actually quite bright, meaning at night I have to turn the phone upside down so it does not light up the room. The blue notification light will supersede the red charging light when both are in play.
The top edge holds the micro-USB connection, an infra-red sensor for use as a TV remote and the 3.5-inch jack for headphones. The silicone case is molded to give plenty of space for the charging USB cable, although I will admit that on occasion I have lifted it out of the case to ensure a good charging connection.
The power button is on the right hand side, with the volume rocker on the left. These are not flush with the sides, making them easy to find, but the silicone case actually rises out slightly to compensate and gives a soft gradation. This is a double edged sword, making the buttons slightly harder to press, but also my brain I wired for the buttons to be on opposite sides, so for the best part of this month I have accidentally been putting my phone to sleep instead of adjusting the volume.
The bottom of the phone has nothing special, except a tiny divot in the top part of the device and a corresponding divot in the silicone case. I presume this is to facilitate easy removal of the screen if required. It certainly isn't to remove the back cover, as that tab is on the rear on the bottom left hand side.
Removing the rear casing is a bit of a chore if you happen to groom your nails and don't have a tool to assist. It always feels as if you're going to break the thing with the force required. Nevertheless will the rear off we can see the 5200 mAh battery taking up most of the room.
Contrary to what you might imagine, the battery is the lighter part of the device, coming in at 83 grams compared to the phone body at 118 grams, which converts to 42% for the battery of the total 201 grams.
Behind the battery we have the indications for the dual SIM of the phone, with the first SIM for 3G/4G requiring a traditional miniSIM card and the second microSIM for 2G (basic data/SMS) but it is placed the other way around to the first SIM. I will point out that you shouldn't place the wrong sized SIM in the wrong hole. I put my microSIM into the top slot designed for a full size card and it started veering sideways - an hour later with the screwdriver and a pair of tweezers, unscrewing things that I'm sure I wasn't supposed to unscrew, and it had it out although a little battered. The microSD card slot is on the left hand size, using a simple slide in mechanism that allows for removal without taking the battery from the phone. I will point out that it didn't see my microSD at first, namely because I put my standard 64GB in there and one of the downsides of the device is the 32GB microSD limitation.
The device fits in my hand comfortably, although not easily to use one handed as I mentioned above. I've been using it in the silicone case, and I have no issues with that - it gives the edges a curve meaning I'm not subject to something sharper such as the Galaxy S6 Edge or One M9. Actually more often than not I'm playing with the case when bored, flicking it off at the edge and reattaching it, in some weird sense of being therapeutic. People who are used to small or light phones are going to notice a difference here as it certainly isn't either of those, but neither are excessive. There's a reason the 7 inch P8 max smartphone sells well in China, for example.
Audio quality is satisfactory on the H1 - my use case for this as of late has involved taking it into the bathroom and leaving it on the side playing music while I shower. This way if I know how long the track is, I can ensure I don't spend too in there if I'm in a hurry. I place the single speaker facing a wall to act as an odd form of amplification, and it only needs to be at around 90% volume to be over the sound of the water. That being said, there is a jump up in the last 5%, causing some minor distortion. As anecdotal as that seems, if you're playing something to a group of people in a noisy environment, it is worth noting. I've mainly been playing melodic or 8-bit speed metal and the clarity at reasonable volume levels are not degraded by a fast paced tune.
Phone call connection quality is also good, despite the fact that I live in an area that seems to have lead paint in the walls. Using it both for audio calls through the air or Skype video calls over Wi-Fi while on business trips came through without issue.
On the camera side, of course we weren't expecting anything great and my own results confirm that. Based on my broken DSLR, I was left with the H1 as my photography device for the recent SuperComputing 15 conference. In the interests of taking pictures to as reference material it was good, as long as I was sitting in the first few rows. In the varied light of the show floor, bad light photos were pretty junk even after post processing in Windows but in light photographs were satisfactory for publication.
For home use, in natural light, the camera provided a much nicer response, giving shots suitable for family albums assuming the subject was still. Cue pictures of cats, food, the theatre and a bookshop (click through for full resolution):
The camera software is the standard android app, and with the H1 it is noticeably slow when taking an image. Focusing is noticably longer than a high end device but if you need to capture one photo in an ongoing scene, it is best to hold down and take up to 40 continuous photographs and then delete most of them. The camera does come with a form of EIS which is great, but the stability range is limited, making a burst capture of at least 2 or 3 required to get the best shot. There are motion capture modes, as well as beautify and panorama also. With Lightroom now free for Android, at least basic photo editing can be done almost immediately.
For an image comparison, I took photographs of three scenes using the devices at my disposal (caution, large images). It is worth noting that the HTC One Max I have suffers from the purple effect, due to the image low-light amplifiers burning out on some early models.
A quick note on the rest of the software - despite the origins of the phone, mine came with an English based kernel / OS. I changed the default home screen to Google Now (because I'm using it a fair bit these days) and all of my usual software and games (Kairosoft, naturally) including Fallout Shelter seem to work and can be switched between easily using the long press on the home button. I have noticed in the past month two apps that seem to close without an error message - it happened once after a crop in Lightroom that involved rotation, and any time I want to start TrickShot. I'm not sure if this is a compatibility issue based on the OS, the platform or the chipset, but I was expecting the H1 to handle it properly.
At this point the 16GB storage on the device hasn't become a burden, perhaps due to the microSD. Pictures come out at ~2MB each and videos at just over 1MB a second using the fine detail settings (720p) saved in 3gp format. From what I have read, the video mode on the H1 gets a lot of criticism due to the low quality or the EIS being very basic. It's true it's not the best to capture long lasting memories on, because at distance there is not much detail and requires a good light source, but it's more of an add on than a focal point.
For video comparisons, the garden and night-time road scenes were used for motion and static video:
It seems somewhat silly to run performance benchmarks when most media outlets talk about high performance smartphones most of the time, but my point to consider is my old phone, and whether moving from quad core Krait 300 at 1.7GHz to a MediaTek quad core A53 chipset at 1.0 GHz but running a newer Android is better or worse. For some of the regular smartphone tests I don't actually own the prerequisite hardware of our smartphone team, but here are some tests I was able to run, and the devices I had to hand at the time:
Devices on Hand for Testing Cubot H1 MediaTek 6735P HTC Desire 610 Snapdragon 400 HTC One Max Snapdragon 600 Huawei Mate S Kirin 935 Huawei Nexus 6P Snapdragon 810 Google Nexus 7 2013 Snapdragon S4Pro Amazon Fire HD 6 (Limited) MediaTek MT8135 OnePlus X Snapdragon 801
When we talk about Qualcomm's Snapdragon 400 family or Intel's partnership with Rockchip partnership for Sofia and Atom, it makes me somewhat sad we don't have many new data points to compare to the MediaTek MT6735P inside the Cubot H1. However the one benchmark were all interested in is the battery life:
So let's put it this way - the H1 on a full charge breaks the Geekbench3 test to the point that it thinks you are cheating. Oops.
With the PCMark test it gets over 15hrs compared to the 6hrs of the Galaxy S6. When you have a large battery and not many pixels to push, with the right efficiency the device will last a night out with only 25% left in the tank in the way that high end smartphones do not. Anecdotally, as I'm writing this, I just spent a few hours in meetings across the other side of London - I spent 30 minutes each way on the tube with Evernote open and being used (albeit with no wireless or updates), and the battery went down from 38% to 33%. That's an hour of solid writing with black text on white for at most 5% of battery.
When I first started using the H1, the graph on the left was my battery usage estimation. Saying 'approximiately 4 days left' is almost unheard of, but with a regular 10% screen on time, the result was the graph in the middle, successfully predicting four days of battery. On the right is another example of my use, although a little bit more aggressive with some charging. Yes, I can confirm that there seems to be something wrong with those percentage calculations. But a quick charge in airplane mode for a few minutes gives a few percentage points of battery – while a lot of smartphones offer quick charging for the capacity to fill quickly, it still depends on the capacity drain of the SoC. It helps to have the best of both worlds. Of course, the downside of this is that it can take 3hrs and up to fully charge the H1. The H1 does come with a cable so you can charge other devices though, as 5200 mAh matches some battery packs.
I'll be brutally honest - while I keep a good tab on some elements of the smartphone market, more so on the business side, when it comes to deep dive analysis I leave it in the hands of Josh, Andrei and Brandon. That doesn't mean I don't need a device though, and despite their suggestions it seems I wanted a lot and wasn't prepared to spend the money. As a technical editor, my search for a smartphone caused a series of positive and negative feedback loops - some days I'd decide that DRAM was the most important, whereas others it would be the display resolution or the storage capacity. In the end it comes down to compromise and what is good and within range at the time I was looking. At one point I was adamant I wanted something more powerful than a Snapdragon 600 series, but I've ended up with a quad core MediaTek A53 device running at low frequency. There were some no-brainers – it had to be big enough and good enough to work on when I have short 20 minute public transport trip s, and support dual SIM so I don't have to keep losing my SIM card each time I travel.
The CUBOT H1 was the result of the search. It's a smartphone that boasts 5200 mAh of battery, which is 3.4x the size of the battery in the iPhone 5c or 2x the battery in the Galaxy S6. When combined with the 1280x720 screen and the 1 GHz quad-core SoC, it gave 4 days of standard use battery which translated to 15 hours and 26 minutes on the PCMark battery test that runs from 100% to 20%, beating the Zenfone 2 by over nine hours. That is pretty much pre-2000 smartphone territory, more akin to what we used to have when playing games like Snake.
My smartphone use case has adapted over time – I want it to do work on. That means writing, switching between apps, being somewhat responsive, and always being available. The SoC means it doesn't break any sort of record for performance, but ultimately so much of my use doesn't require performance but rather latency in app switching and updates. Having enough memory to keep apps available means a lot, so moving up from 1GB to 2GB was a big enough change to notice, as well as the bump up to Android 5.1. The 16GB storage model is pretty basic, and the microSD compatibility is only at 32GB, rather than something bigger, and I know it will fill over time with the consistent photographing of my cats. But that is a risk that I'm going to have to take, or synchronize with Dropbox.
Without the silicone case that comes free with the phone, I will grant that despite the patterned edge, it does feel like the plastic the rear is made from, and arguably it slips out of the hand too easily. With the silicone case, it just feels like a smartphone with a case, which a lot of people use anyway. The raised power and volume buttons helps discern their location, and the fixed buttons is something I like to have on my device, even if it means giving up screen real estate.
It is clear that the cameras are not for taking glamour shots. But at a trade show, as long as you are in the front row, and have a second or two between shots, taking pictures of slides to work on later is good enough. To get a good shot taking advantage of the EIS though, you really need to use the burst mode which supports 40 shots at 13 MP each. The video is also an afterthought. That comes down to the price and what needs to be cut to meet that price. I purchased the device, brand new from Amazon, for £125 which translates to $160 pre-tax. Almost everyone I showed the phone to, probably due to the battery life argument, thought it was more expensive. The only people who guessed under (and only by $10) were a pair of senior ARM employees. But truth be told, I could buy four of these a year and it would still be cheaper than an S6. Of course, there are obvious caveats with that comparison.
I would say that this is going to be my phone for the next two years. But since I purchased it in October, two extra high end smartphones that others at AnandTech have tested have both landed on my desk for similar experiential testing. It almost seems sad to shelve the Cubot H1 immediately unless I adapt to carry two phones at once, with the H1 as that long-battery backup.
CUBOT H1 SoC Mediatek MT6735P4x ARM Cortex-A53 at 977 MHzARM Mali-T720 MP2 at 400 MHz RAM 2GB LPDDR3 at 533 MHz Storage 16GB NAND Display 5.5" 720p IPS Modem 2G / 3G / 4G LTE UE Category 4DC-HSPA+, TD-SCDMA, CDMA2000 1x/EVDO Rev. A, EDGE Networks TDD LTE None FDD LTE B1 / B3 / B7 / B20 UMTS 900 / 1900 / 2100 GSM 850 / 900 / 1800 / 1900 Dimensions 154.5 (h) x 76.6 (w) x 9.2 (d) mm,201 grams*Weight Measured by AnandTech, conflicting numbers online Cameras Rear 12.8MP ( 4128 x 3096 ) Front 8MP ( 3264 x 2448 ) Battery 5200 mAh (19.76 Whr) OS Android 5.1 Connectivity 802.11a/b/g/n 2.4GHzBT 4.0, GPS, A-GPS, Micro-USB SIM Size Micro-SIM (FDD-LTE, WCDMA, GSM)Nano-SIM (GSM Only)Also Separate MicroSD slot, up to 32GB MSRP (UK) 16GB $160 £125 as purchasedSo the final question becomes 'how is it pronounced?' Do we say cue-bot? Or perhaps cub-bot, or cue-bow? After writing this review, and looking at their online 'CUBOT enterprise propaganda film' on YouTube, it turns out to be coo-bot.
Source: The CUBOT H1 Smartphone Test: A Month with 3-4 Days of Battery per Charge
Comments
Post a Comment