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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.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Bill Dimm on Sunday July 24 2016, @02:39PM
That's pretty important. I'm not an expert and haven't read the article, but I'm guessing that means that you can't use LTE band 12 because T-Mobile will block the band if it doesn't support voice (the Honor 5X has the same problem -- the hardware supposedly supports band 12 but you can't actually use it). It's my understanding that a lot of T-Mobile's build-out is band 12. On the T-Mobile website they refer to band 12 as "Extended Range LTE" if you want to check the coverage difference (which may change over time).
The specs for the Blu R1 HD don't sound any better than the Samsung On5 that you can get from T-Mobile (prepaid) or MetroPCS for $60. The On5 supports band 12.