REVIEW: Bluboo X6

It costs just £90 but packs 4G connectivity, a 5.5in screen and a fingerprint scanner. What's not to like?

The Bluboo X6 is a 4G LTE Android KitKat phablet with a fingerprint scanner that costs

The Bluboo X6 looks good for a budget phone. It G3’s Quick Circle case, with a silicone rear cover and a front flap that has a circular window through which you can see a clock face.

The plastic build keeps down the weight, and at 167g the X6 is light for an 8.8mm-thick phablet. The rear cover is thin but clips on tight. It’s removable, too, giving access to an also-removable 3000mAh battery and dual-SIM slots. One of these doubles as a microSD slot, although Bluboo doesn’t specify how much storage it can accommodate (many budget phones allow 32GB).

Available in blue or white, the rear cover features a chequered design that aids grip in the hand. With a 5.5in screen and an 8.8mm-thick body this is a large phone, although its slim bezels to the left and right make it just about manageable in a single hand.

Around the edges you’ll find two speaker grilles at the bottom, a volume rocker and power switch on the right side, and a Micro-USB charging port and 3.5mm headphone jack on top. A 13Mp camera is on the rear, surrounded by a pink anodised aluminium ring and supported by a dual-LED flash.

At the front is a 2.5D Arc screen, which means it is curved at the edges. This has a nice effect, but it doesn’t lie flush to the case. The top and bottom bezels are larger, with a physical home button at the bottom that builds in a fingerprint sensor.

The screen itself is an IPS panel. While colours are realistic and it’s usefully bright, a quarter-HD resolution of 960x540 is pushed almost to its limit on a 5.5in screen. The X6 has a pixel density of 200ppi, which isn’t horrendous but it’s not as sharp as we’d like. For web browsing it’s fine, but for viewing media you might prefer an HD display. The large panel is useful in this regard, mind.

When you’re paying £90 for a smartphone, you can’t expect blistering performance. However, in many of our benchmarks the Bluboo impressed us. Its performance is due to the phone’s MediaTek MTK6732 SOC, which integrates a 1.3MHz ARM Cortex A-53 quad-core CPU and Mali-T760 MP2 dual-core GPU, plus 1GB of RAM.

In Geekbench 3.0 we measured 654 points in the single-core test, and 1940 points multi-core. Other 5.5in phablets we’ve tested such as the ZTE Blade S6 Plus are faster, but in the real world performance is adequate, but it’ll take a second to launch most apps, though.

Performance was also good in GFXBench 3.0, which tests the graphics performance. The Bluboo recorded 25fps in T-Rex, and 13fps in Manhattan.

In our Geekbench 3.0 battery test, the Bluboo recorded 2946 points, and seven hours 22 minutes. To put that into perspective, its time recording is on par with the 2015 Moto G, but its point score falls just below the Kingzone Z1, another Chinese 5.5in phablet (page 76).

Storage-wise you get 8GB built in, with around 6GB available, and if you don’t need the second SIM slot you can insert a microSD card. This is Android, too, so expect to be able to make use of all manner of third-party cloud storage services - Google Drive is preinstalled for you.

When you’re buying a phone from China you should always check the frequency bands to ensure it will be supported by your UK mobile operator. The Bluboo X6 supports GSM 850/900/1800/ 1900MHz, WCDMA 900/1900/2100MHz, and Cat 4 FDD-LTE B1/B3/B7/B20.

Other connectivity specs include Bluetooth 4.0, single-band 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi, GPS and A-GPS, and USB OTG. While there’s no NFC there is HotKnot, which is MediaTek’s alternative.

If you’re not using the second SIM slot as a microSD slot, you can take advantage of dualstandby dual-SIM functionality.

For photography, there’s a 13Mp camera at the rear and an impressive 8Mp at the front. It’s not all about the megapixels, but we were impressed with the photos and test video we captured on the X6 (it’ll record 1080p at 30fps). A dual-LED flash is also useful for improving low-light performance.

The X6 runs a slightly customised version of Android KitKat, and it’s not one we’re particularly keen on. The key difference between vanilla KitKat and what we have here is the X6’s use of themes. Four are installed on the Bluboo X6, and not one of them is what we’d consider normal. The default theme, for example, switches the Google Play icon to a red tile with rounded corners and a white house icon; the only thing giving away its purpose is the legend below. The themes will change the wallpaper and icons, but you can also separately customise the wallpaper and lock screen, but not through the Settings menu. Themes and wallpaper customisations are instead made through the Theme manager, which is found in the App menu.

Verdict

For a cheap phablet the Bluboo X6 has a lot going for it. It’s reasonably fast compared to its similarly priced rivals, it supports 4G and dual-SIM functionality, and the large screen is useful.