I decided to do a little review on my newly purchased phone, the Cubot Power 4G.
I got it from Gearbest for $199 + $5.44 for priority shipping.
Here's the product's link: Cubot Power 4G
I won't be going into great technical details, because imho I find it quite boring - the specs are all over the internet if you need them :)
The phone arrived in a white, rectangular cardboard box.
The front face of the box is textured - nice little attention to detail.
Here's the phone specs as shown in the back side of its box.
The box included a couple of instruction manuals and compliance documents as well as a sim tray ejection tool.
As with most Chinese manufacturers nowadays, there was also a simple clear TPU case included.
The case is simple yet it provides a fair amount of protection.
The phone has a 5.99" FullHD+ screen with the 'modern' aspect ratio of 18:9.
The bezels are pretty thin, the colors are vivid and overall it's a nice standard display overall. (My previous phone was a Xiaomi Mi Max 2, so that's what I am using as a comparison)
I found the max brightness to be super bright - no problem whatsoever with outdoor usage - though I would like the minimum brightness to be able to get a bit lower.
The back cover of the Power 4G is plastic with a mirror finish, while the sides are metal in dark chrome finish.
The design is quite impressive and of course it's a fingerprint magnet :)
The back camera is using a 16.0MP Samsung sensor, while the flash is NW tinted and it's plenty bright.
I found the performance of the sensor to be excellent at daytime - Of course, the nighttime shots are not as good, which is quite expected from a budget smartphone.
The front facing camera is 8.0MP and its overall quality is more than good for selfies and such.
I will be including some sample photos soon!
The user interface of the camera is pretty rich and provides a lot of options.
Here's a quick shot of how the UI looks like.
The fingerprint sensor is very accurate. So far I haven't encountered a situation where my finger won't be recognized.
I am pretty sure that its response time is below the 0.5 sec mark.
The charging interface is using a USB TYPE-C port with a rated maximum current of 2A at 5V.
Unfortunately the device doesn't support any of the modern quick charge implementations, so you are looking at around 3 hours to fully charged the 6000mAh battery.
The dual speaker grills are there just for symmetry, as the actual speaker is installed in the left one.
At the right side of the phone, there are the volume rockers and the power button.
Both buttons are quite tactile.
Opposite to the power button there is the sim card slot.
The phone supports either a SIM + microSD or SIM1 + SIM2 configuration, although with the provided 128GB of internal storage I don't see myself
using a microSD any time soon!
Thankfully, Cubot hasn't followed the latest trends and hasn't removed the 3.5mm jack.
The phone comes with Android 8.1 with the whole interface being based on the AOSP Rom.
The looks of the operating system is pretty minimal, yet it's super fluid and lag-free.
The 6000mAh battery of the phone, combined with its 6GB of ram is the main reason why I got the phone.
After having the phone for around 10 days, I have done a few full charge/discharge cycles.
Each full charge gets me around 10Hours of screen-on time with 3 days of usage (always connected to either Wifi or 4G/LTE data)
To sum my mini review, I would like to tell a few words regarding the performance of the processor.
At first I was quite worried about the potential problems that I would get with a Mediatek CPU (so far all of my smartphones used Snapdragon ones), though it turned
out that the P23 surpassed my expectations.
The Helio P23 should be on par with the SD625 and so far I haven't experience any high temperatures, high discharge rates or lags while gaming.
All in all, I believe that the Cubot Power is a very respectable phone.
Its features are quite impressive considering its price point and one would definitely enjoy using it.