SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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: 5, Informative) by nyder on Sunday July 24 2016, @12:01PM
I bought the 2gb/16gb version for $59. It's an excellent phone for it's price. The ads aren't annoying, usually it's just 1 small notification size one on the lockscreen, unless you have no notifications, then it's a full screen one. As for games, I didn't find it sluggish for games like NFS Most Wanted, HIT, Pokemon Go and Ghostbusters Slimer. It does take a bit longer to load games then my tablet. In fact, I think Ghostbusters Slimer has locked up while it's loading because it takes like 2 mins to load up. Sword of Chaos is the only game that has slowdowns during play for me. Going to test Mortal Kombat X, but shit, it's 1.84gb. That won't be done by the time I'm done typing.
Screen is really bright and seems decent. My 4Glte on AT&T networks is working fine. The speaker is a bit sucky, and why are they always on the back side? I found the camera to be fine, I'm wondering if the reviewer didn't take the plastic piece off that was covering it? Might not of been that noticeable on his/her phone. And it has a headphone jack.
The review did review the 1gb/8gb version of the phone, which anyone in there right mind would of paid the $9 difference for the 2gb/16gb version.
As for getting root and removing the lockscreen, that is being worked on currently.
As for thinking amazon is spying on everything you do on the phone I want to point out some difference between this phone and their previous offerings. This run Android OS 6.0, the older fire phones/fire tablets/fire tv all run Fire OS, and amazon made fork of the android OS. So they have actually loosened up their control on this phone by a lot. Not saying that doesn't mean there isn't anything hidden, just saying it seems like they loosened the reigns on this phone.
Personally if you want a cheap phone that works beyond it's price point, not picking up a Blu R1 HD would be foolish. If you don't want the ads, pony up the extra $50, you are still getting a bargain. $109 for an unlocked phone that works with AT&T, T-Mobile & Verizon (supposedly, they list it), runs android 6, and has it's specs? worth it.