Prestigio Multiphone 5550 Duo
The Multiphone 5550 Duo from Prestigio is a 5.5in dual-SIM Android KitKat smartphone with a quad-core chip and 13Mp camera. It retails for a low price of just £135, and has great battery life. So what’s the catch? Let’s take a look to find out.
A slab of black plastic fronted with Gorilla Glass 3, place the 5550 Duo next to the also 5.5in LG G3 and you will immediately notice that the Prestigio phone is bulky. Big, even. It’s a lot longer than is the LG G3, and also a lot thicker at 9.2mm.
It’s not hugely heavy, though, weighing in at 166g. And it feels lighter because that weight is spread out over a comparatively large shell. But this is not a phone for small hands. A female colleague felt that she couldn’t have the 5550 Duo as her primary handset for exactly that reason. But if you have bucket hands it won’t be an issue.
Nor will it be a problem if you are clumsy as it’s built to last. The entire front fascia is made of Corning Gorilla Glass 3, and the back and sides is of a metallic plastic composite. Despite regular drop tests, we couldn’t mark either. It’s a robust device. Which is interesting because the back peels off to reveal the two SIM slots, a memory card slot and the removable battery. And on its own that backside feels thin and a little cheap. It does flex, however, which may be the secret of its success.
The Multiphone has a 5.5in IPS display, with a resolution of 1280x720. That makes for a pixel density of 267ppi. This is decidedly lower middle of the road these days, nothing like the mega sharpness of top of the shop models, but priced to match. And there is not a lot wrong with the display. It’s certainly not the brightest or sharpest, but it is colourful and plenty bright enough.
Photos can look a little hazy around the edges, and colours lack a little punch. Video is similar: okay without being earth shattering. In general navigation you notice a little pixellation around the edges of icons, and an occasional general feeling of, well, being-a-bit-wetness. There’s occasional ghosting during transitions and interactions. It’s not super impressive, but we prefer it to the overblown nature of colours in some more expensive OLEDs, for example.
With a MediaTek MT6582 motherboard, the Multiphone pairs a quadcore chip clocked at 1.3GHz with 1GB RAM. Performance is okay, if not brilliant. And a mixed bag. In general it feels like a responsive device, but more intense visual processes such as gaming are a little flat.
One thing we love about the Multiphone is its excellent battery life. It’s fitted with a 3000mAH cell, and we found that it could easily last more than a day in use – sometimes getting closer to two days. And when we left it on but unused over the weekend, in 72 hours the battery only lost 10 percent of its charge. Impressive.
Where the Prestigio starts to shine is its dual-SIM capability. You can load it up with both a full-size and a micro SIM. It doesn’t take a nano SIM, though, you could always use an adaptor to put in either two micro SIMs or a nano SIM. We tested the phone with two SIMs (both UK Three SIMS), and found it worked seamlessly.
Other connectivity options include a 32GB Micro SDHC card slot, and 802.11 b/g/n Wi-Fi. It is a Bluetooth 4.0 handset, but offers only 3G, and not 4G.
It connects and charges via Micro-USB, and has a 3.5mm jack for your headphones. Other connectivity options include an FM radio, and GPS.
The Multiphone comes with Android 4.4 KitKat, and has full access to Google Play and all other features of recent Android. It’s Prestigio’s own version of Android, however, which may explain some of that storage hogging. The most noticeable difference to vanilla Android is that the fonts and icons are all slightly different. And Prestigio includes a special, er, clock (see above).
More important are the myriad apps that were installed on our review unit when it arrived. These include: Battery Doctor, Booking. com, Deezer, eBay, Flashlight, and Prestigio’s own eReader and News and Weather apps. There’s also Prestigio Plaza – Prestigio’s own app- and hardware store. QuickSupport, Office Pro and Tap The Frog HD are all included, and take up space.
More helpfully all the apps we have installed on an LG G3 installed when we synched my account, which is another reason for relative lack of available storage.
But whichever way you look at it, Prestigio’s installed apps take up a chunk of the 8GB storage. We hate the way that Android hardware makers do this, taking a cut to add in third-party apps and services – in a similar way to PC builders offsetting their costs with antivirus trials (and yes, McAfee can be found on this handset). It is the hidden price of a cheap smartphone, and for many it will be a price too far.
The 5550 Duo has two cameras, a front-facing 2Mp device for selfies and a 13Mp rear-facing camera. More specifically, this main camera is an 8Mp sensor interpolated to 13Mp, AF with Sony IMX179 sensor. It’s actually pretty decent. Not likely to replace your DSLR any time soon, but certainly a worthy smartphone camera.
Verdict
The Prestigio Multiphone 5550 Duo offers a great feature set, in a well-built shell. If you need a dual-SIM phone, this is a great and inexpensive option.