OS, UI and Everyday Use

One issue we often encounter on budget phone reviews is poor UI design. Small companies want to make their phones different, so they go about skinning Android and making a mess of it. Others use stock Android instead, which is probably the way to go.

Bluboo decided to play it safe and keep its skin simplistic and close to stock Android 5.1. The icon pack is different, so most icons are round. It’s a matter of taste, but we think the overall appearance is ok. A lot of Cyanogen and MIUI themes feature the same round icon look.

Of course, you can always go for a different launcher in case you don’t like it.

Apart from the icons, this is more or less stock Android 5.1. The good old app drawer is still there. You won’t have any trouble navigating the menus and setting everything up, especially if you ever used a Nexus device. Not a lot to report in the OS and UI department, so let’s check out the rest of the package.

We already mentioned MiraVision, which can be a very useful addition to mainstream phones, allowing the user to fine-tune the display.

The fingerprint scanner is Bluboo’s key market differentiator and the fact that the phone owes its name to it (Xtouch) means the company is taking it seriously. When it comes to cheap phones with fingerprint scanners, we tend to be sceptical, but this time around, Bluboo managed to do a good job.

The 360-degree sensor is reliable and fast. In fact, it’s no worse than the one we had a chance to try out on the Lenovo ZUK Z1, which costs twice as much. A lot of vendors choose to place fingerprint scanners on the back, but we feel the right place for them is at the front (Apple does it, end of discussion).

The fingerprint sensor unlocks the phone in less than half a second and we have no complaints about reliability. It works quite well and it’s no worse than fingerprint sensors found on much more expensive big-brand devices. Nicely done.

The phone also supports a number of gestures, although many of them are gimmicky and rather slow. We’ve seen better gesture implementations on other devices. Double tap to wake functionality is on board as well.

With a 3050mAh battery and a 1.3GHz processor, you’d expect relatively good battery life. A lot of phablets with bigger screens and faster processors use similar capacity batteries and get away with it. The Xtouch does rather well, but we expected more. If you are really careful, you can squeeze up to two days out of the battery, and even heavy users and should have some juice left in the morning if they forget to charge their phone. However, we’ve seen similar results from bigger devices with 3000mAh batteries, namely the Meizu M2 Note, with a 20% bigger screen. It’s possible that Bluboo didn’t optimize the system as well as Meizu.

Bluboo says the phone uses MTK fast charging technology, giving you an hour of talk time for 10 minutes of charging. The company doesn’t try to oversell the battery capacity, saying that heavy users should get all-day battery life.

We had no significant problems with GPS reception.

That's one huge card tray. It can accomodate two SIM cards and a microSD card at the same time.