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This $50 Android Smartphone may be the Best Deal in Tech

posted by cmn32480 on Sunday July 24 2016, @08:36AM   Printer-friendly
from the cheap-but-not-"cheap" dept.

-- OriginalOwner_ writes:

Tom's Guide reports

Blu R1 HD Review: Great for $50, with a Catch

The good

  • Superaffordable
  • Sleek design
  • Bright [5-inch, 1280 x 720] display
  • Good battery life

The bad

  • Amazon ads are annoying
  • Blurry camera
  • Has trouble with graphic-intensive apps

[...] This budget Android device can be had for as low as $49 unlocked, but that price is only available for Amazon Prime members who are willing to look at all kinds of Amazon offers and promotions every time they open the lock screen.

[...] Packing a quad-core, 1.3-GHz MediaTek 6735 ARM Cortex processor with [1 GB] of RAM, the Blu R1 HD is powerful enough for basic tasks, but not great for resource-intensive apps. It never slowed me down during my day-to-day activities, whether I was checking messages, jumping between apps, or watching videos on YouTube or Amazon Video.

However, it's not ideal for the highest-end games in the Play Store. The gory, graphically intense action of Mortal Kombat X was playable but noticeably chuggy on the R1. The game also took quite a while to load, but, to be fair, I wasn't expecting stellar gaming performance from a $50 device.

[...] If you'd rather not succumb to your Amazon overlords, the ad-free version of the phone starts at $99 for the 8GB/1GB model, and costs $109 for the 16GB/2GB model.

[...] One big caveat: [For] carriers, it only works with AT&T and T-Mobile.

Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by maxwell demon on Sunday July 24 2016, @09:41AM

    by maxwell demon (1608) on Sunday July 24 2016, @09:41AM (#379347) Journal

    The total cost of this phone is $50 plus the advertisements. Note that this not only includes immaterial cost like annoyance and privacy, not to mention the time those ads cost you, but also very material cost like bandwidth you have to pay for, and energy usage, which also translates into cost.

    --
    The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 24 2016, @10:01AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 24 2016, @10:01AM (#379351)

    You pays another $50 for

    the ad-free version of the phone starts at $99

    and you stops your whining.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 24 2016, @02:30PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 24 2016, @02:30PM (#379412)

      The ads may stop for the extra $50 but Amazon tracking everything you do like you're something they own doesn't.