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Customer Review
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 24 December 2023
I resisted getting a smartphone for a long time, largely because the people I know who have them have endless trouble with theirs. However, I was using a 4G-wifi device which was costing £24 a month for 30GB, and I realised the savings I could make in a year by using a phone as a hotspot would pay for a smartphone within a year, so I read hundreds of reviews for different phones and settled on this one as the most affordable one that lacked complaints about unreliability issues. I bought a 50GB SIM to use in it costing £11 a month (£10 initially). A review here gave me the confidence that this should work as it was from someone who was already using this model of phone as a hotspot with the same network. The hotspot works beautifully, and it's much faster at getting the data in, so it now allows my computer to play youtube videos without the picture freezing repeatedly.
Everything else about the phone is thus a bonus as my main need was to connect my computer to the internet through it, but I was looking for a phone that wouldn't cut out during calls or do bizarre things with the display to make the keyboard and speakerphone hard to access during calls - the kind of problems that plague the smartphones of other members of my family, and this one did not disappoint as it just does the job properly without complications.
I've never been interested in computer games, but there was one exception, and it would test the phone maximally: I was hoping to find a formula 1 game, and I settled on Monoposto which it handles with ease, so I've spent a month on the Netherlands circuit (having turned off all the driving assistance). My only complaint is that if the battery level hits 20%, it flashes up a huge warning message which makes driving on impossible. Another issue is that it's hard to hold the device without occasionally hitting the brake by accident with the skin of the left hand bulging round the side onto the edge of the screen unless you turn the phone upside down to put the wider margin there, but then the screen keeps dimming unless you search for a setting to turn that off - I think the problem's caused by a proximity sensor, but it can be resolved if you find the right menu.
The other apps that attracted my attention all work on it too: Stellarium, electronic compass, GPS, a synthesiser (the speakers are good and loud without distortion), instrument tuner (because I make flutes) - everything I want works on it just fine. The camera does a good job too - I've just been testing it on nacreous clouds and got good results after finding an exposure control (a long touch on the screen brings it up), though nothing like as good as what you see directly with your eyes. I'd put a picture in here if I could transfer it easily to this computer, but I don't have an easy way to do that, and connecting it with a cable doesn't appear to enable me to access its files, perhaps because they're on the internal storage rather than a micro-SD card - that's something which I need to investigate further, but it may just be that I don't know enough about how to use it. Regardless of that, all my doubts about smartphones have been blown away by this one. I can't know if it's the best one in its approximate price range though - there's a Samsung costing £30 to 40 more which was my second choice, but whether it's better or not I cannot tell as I'm more than happy with this one and am certainly keeping it.
Edit: Further information about its capability. It can screen record (i.e. video what's happening on the screen including the audio and/or microphone input), and it can do this while running that formula one game with smooth results - I wasn't expecting it to have the processing power needed for that, but it handles it fine.
Everything else about the phone is thus a bonus as my main need was to connect my computer to the internet through it, but I was looking for a phone that wouldn't cut out during calls or do bizarre things with the display to make the keyboard and speakerphone hard to access during calls - the kind of problems that plague the smartphones of other members of my family, and this one did not disappoint as it just does the job properly without complications.
I've never been interested in computer games, but there was one exception, and it would test the phone maximally: I was hoping to find a formula 1 game, and I settled on Monoposto which it handles with ease, so I've spent a month on the Netherlands circuit (having turned off all the driving assistance). My only complaint is that if the battery level hits 20%, it flashes up a huge warning message which makes driving on impossible. Another issue is that it's hard to hold the device without occasionally hitting the brake by accident with the skin of the left hand bulging round the side onto the edge of the screen unless you turn the phone upside down to put the wider margin there, but then the screen keeps dimming unless you search for a setting to turn that off - I think the problem's caused by a proximity sensor, but it can be resolved if you find the right menu.
The other apps that attracted my attention all work on it too: Stellarium, electronic compass, GPS, a synthesiser (the speakers are good and loud without distortion), instrument tuner (because I make flutes) - everything I want works on it just fine. The camera does a good job too - I've just been testing it on nacreous clouds and got good results after finding an exposure control (a long touch on the screen brings it up), though nothing like as good as what you see directly with your eyes. I'd put a picture in here if I could transfer it easily to this computer, but I don't have an easy way to do that, and connecting it with a cable doesn't appear to enable me to access its files, perhaps because they're on the internal storage rather than a micro-SD card - that's something which I need to investigate further, but it may just be that I don't know enough about how to use it. Regardless of that, all my doubts about smartphones have been blown away by this one. I can't know if it's the best one in its approximate price range though - there's a Samsung costing £30 to 40 more which was my second choice, but whether it's better or not I cannot tell as I'm more than happy with this one and am certainly keeping it.
Edit: Further information about its capability. It can screen record (i.e. video what's happening on the screen including the audio and/or microphone input), and it can do this while running that formula one game with smooth results - I wasn't expecting it to have the processing power needed for that, but it handles it fine.
