Teracube 2e
Putting the environment ahead of performance.
A phone that looks as boring as the Teracube 2e has no right to be this interesting. This US$199 phone is sold on the idea that you can use it for four years or more, not just a couple.
It comes with a four-year warranty and has a replaceable battery just like phones from the old days (and the similarly positioned Fairphone range).
You get an unusually tough case in the box too. And while the Teracube 2e’s warranty doesn’t cover you for cracked screens, there is a reasonable US$59 cost for such repairs.
There’s a question mark over whether Teracube will actually exist in several years’ time to honor the warranty and provide the “3 years of Android and security updates” it promises. But that is always a risk when you buy from a start-up rather than an established tech giant.
The Teracube 2e is notable for the ways it rejects a few conventions of phone design. You can pry off its exceptionally bland plastic back and get access to the battery. It pops out just like those from the early days of smartphones.
This is the substance behind the claim the Teracube 2e is a phone you can use for four years or more. As you probably know, rechargeable batteries have a limited lifespan.
“A normal battery is designed to retain up to 80% of its original capacity at 500 complete charge cycles when operating under normal conditions,” says the Apple website about iPhone batteries. It’s perfectly normal for battery life to end up clearly worse after a couple of years, and this normal wear and tear is not covered by any standard warranty.
You can replace the ‘non user-replaceable’ batteries of many modern phones, but it involves surgery. You’ll usually
There’s a question mark over whether Teracube will actually exist in several years’ time to honor the warranty and provide the “3 years of Android and security updates” it promises.
have to use a heat gun to loosen the glue that keeps the back in place.
Teracube 2e’s battery is easy to replace. The US$49 cost of extra batteries may seem steep given you can find ‘new’ batteries for older Samsung phones for less than half that on eBay, but Teracube isn’t making these things on the scale of Samsung.
There’s a downside to the Teracube approach. A lack of rubberised seals around the rear case makes water ingress much more likely. And the battery contacts are right there to see, waiting to be shorted. Motorola uses a ‘nano coating’ on some of its budget phones to avoid this, without going down the more expensive route of water resistance that provides an IP rating-grade seal.
The Teracube 2e’s battery is easy to replace, and easier to damage than most.
This is less likely to be a problem
if you use the included case. A lot of phones come with a thin transparent silicone case, intended to avoid scratches while letting you see the finish underneath.
Display
The Teracube 2e’s screen measures 6.1 inches across and, like the displays of almost every smartphone, looks pretty good.
Color is reasonably well saturated for a cheaper phone, image sharpness is fine, and max brightness is surprisingly high. It hits 596 nits according to our colorimeter, about 150 more than you might expect from a solid budget display.
That said, we did find the camera preview image a little dimmer than we’d like when out taking photos, as the Teracube 2e doesn’t fiddle with color and contrast to improve visibility in bright conditions.
That’s the end of the Teracube
2e’s notable display abilities. It does not support HDR, its 720p resolution is not as sharp as that of the 1080p phones available at the same price, and the screen refresh rate is the standard 60Hz. So it doesn’t have the scrolling smoothness of a 90Hz or 120Hz display.
Specs and performance
The Teracube 2e’s processor is more likely to be an issue for some of you. It’s the MediaTek Helio A25, which tends to be used in phones significantly cheaper than the Teracube 2e.
Sure, it has eight cores, but its performance is not close to, for example, the Snapdragon 662 used in the Moto G9 Power. It scores 738 points in Geekbench 5, to the ~1400 of the G8 Power.
There’s some good news. The Teracube 2e’s general performance is okay, most likely because it has 4GB of RAM. A few cheap phones with this kind of limited processor also have the absolute minimum amount of RAM, and it can make daily use a total chore.
Those phones make us long for the day the review is over, and we can get rid of a review device. But the Teracube 2e’s day-to-day experience is perfectly fine.
Sure, there are some slight pauses when you switch apps or load up the virtual keyboard.
However, there’s nothing in the basics to give you a headache.
Teracube saved some money on the 2e’s chipset, and the same is true of the camera hardware and software R&D (or lack thereof). The Teracube 2e has two rear cameras. there’s a 13MP primary camera with an f/2.0 lens and an 8MP ultra-wide with an f/2.2 lens.
We have only one nice thing to say about the Teracube 2e’s camera, which is that the main camera can take passable photos if you choose your framing carefully and take the time to use the HDR mode. Other than that, it does not compare well to almost any other similarly priced phone we might mention.
The Teracube 2e is a highconcept phone with an admirably long warranty and some environmental cred, but it’s not a great buy if you want to do more than the very basics.
Andrew Williams