A budget phone that isn’t technology’s finest hour
This is, according to its press release, ‘the world’s first V for Victory smartphone’. We can only admire the Dunkirk spirit that inspires marketing people to come up with this kind of Churchillian nonsense. Faced with the odds against finding something new to say about a phone – especially one assembled by a Chinese manufacturer from generic parts at a knock-down price – the truly heroic response is a strategic retreat into gibberish.
What they’re trying to tell us is that the Cubot X17’s 8-megapixel wide-angle front camera constantly watches for you flipping the ‘V’ sign. When you do so, it takes a photo. This could be handy if you want to be absolutely sure you’re making a two-fingered gesture in every selfie. It also recognises another gesture, ‘wave to unlock’, making your phone about as secure as the borders of Europe. Fortunately, both options can be turned off.
This is not the end of the X17’s features. It’s not even the beginning of the end. Also on the front is a 5in Full HD (1920x1080-pixel) screen, while the back provides a second camera with 13 megapixels. In between is a sturdy metal frame. There’s 16GB of storage inside, and you can install up to two SIM cards, handy if you’re regularly in another country. Never in the field of phone specifications was so much offered for so few pounds. Well, hardly ever.
The whole thing is squeezed into a thickness of just 6.1mm, which even by today’s slender standards is very slim indeed. It makes it all the more impressive that the X17 still feels well built. Its bland iPhone-clone styling, with the square edges of Sony’s Xperia series, stops it short of looking exceptional, but it does look as if it costs more than £125.
The display is better than you’d expect for the price, too – not only sharp, but with high brightness and covering a decent 91 per cent of the sRGB colour range. And although the Mediatek processor is no match for the fast chips in more expensive devices, it’s better than some budget buys. Android 5.1 (Lollipop) ran pretty smoothly, apart from the usual stuttering on complicated web pages, and advanced 3D games were just about playable, albeit with some glitches.
As for what the press release calls a ‘pin-sharp, 16-megapixel rear camera’, it only has 13 megapixels – the higher figure is achieved by interpolation, or to give it the proper technical term, cheating – and it’s no sharper than average. You’ll be fine in the broad sunlit uplands, but in the dark valleys your picture quality suffers. The more photos you take, the more you’ll notice the limitations of the built-in storage. 16GB isn’t too bad for a budget phone, but it’s a shame there’s no microSD card slot to expand it. Give us the tools, Cubot, and we’ll finish the job.
Another disappointment is the X17’s battery life. There’s not much room for lithium ions in this sliver of a phone, which didn’t go on to the end, but gave up after seven hours of video playback. It’ll last longer in light use, and you can turn that bright screen right down to eke it out, but this is still among the worst results we’ve seen recently.
Cubot has only just started selling phones in the UK, and there’s a lot to like about this one. It just doesn’t quite add up to a device we’d choose over its rivals. Perhaps this is not its finest hour. But as someone once said, success is not final, failure is not fatal; it is the courage to continue that counts.
VERDICT
The X17 doesn’t distinguish itself as much as it promises, but considering the low price, we wouldn’t stick two fingers up at it.
SPECIFICATIONS
5in 1920x1080-pixel screen • 13-megapixel rear camera • 8-megapixel front camera • 16GB flash storage • 802.11n Wi-Fi • Bluetooth 4.0 • 3G/4G • Android 5.1 • 143x69x6.1mm (HxWxD) • 163g • One-year warranty