Bu Bush Spira E3X
Bush’s budget phone branches out
Some companies, such as Motorola and HTC, have gained renown through mobile phones. Others, like Apple and Sony, were already well known before they made phones. And then there’s Bush. The company was founded in 1932 to sell the big horn-type loudspeakers that used to be attached to gramophones, and was named after Shepherd’s Bush, the west London suburb that was once the centre of the broadcasting industry.
After various mergers, Bush shut up shop in the 1980s, but the brand name lived on – acquired by an even older rival, Alba – and was slapped on electronic goods made abroad. Then, in 2008, both names were bought up by Home Retail Group, the parent company of Argos, which this year was bought by Sainsburys. It’s a wonder these firms get round to making anything, really, in between swapping names and buying each other up.
Anyway, someone, somewhere (China, obviously), has made the Bush Spira E3X for Argos, which sells it exclusively through its own shops – those ones where you go to the trouble of turning up in person, but you still can’t see anything in the flesh andd have to fill in an order form and wait for your purchases to arrive. Fortunately, they also have a website.
For £200, the Spira E3X promises an awful lot. Traditionally, budget models have a small, coarse screen, minimal storage, a basic camera and few mod cons. Here you get an iphone Plus-sized 5.5in Full HD screen, a very generous 64GB of storage, a 21.5- megapixel camera and a fingerprint sensor. It’s all powered by recent Android 6.0 Marshmallow software, with no annoying tweaks, running on an eight-core Mediatek MT6755 processor.
We found it about as smooth in general tasks and web browsing as our top budget phone, the Moto G4 (see our review, Issue 479), though it struggled with demanding 3D games. At 11 hours 19 minutes in our video-playback test, battery life was no problem. Although it might initially be frustrating that the USBB Type-c charging port doesn’t fit all the microusb cables you have lying around the house, it is less fiddly to use (you can plug it in either way round, like an iphone Lightning cable) and is certainly more future-proof.
Of course, corners have been cut, but not savagely. The metal frame, toughened glass and chamfered edges look great, but the rough-textured back is plastic, and this isn’t the thinnest or lightest phone araround. Even so, it feels very well made, reminding us of the excellent Oneplus 2, and even the Bush logo is classy. The screen covered only 83 per cent of the SRGB colour range in our tests (100 per cent is the norm for higher-priced devices), but this is sufficient for general purposes, and unlike some rivals, it does go very bright.
Our biggest concern was that the main camera’s high resolution didn’t translate into sharp pictures. Our photos suffered from a lot of noise (digital grain), both indoors and out, as well as rather weak colours. A handful of filters in the camera app at least let you enhance the results for your social media, but this isn’t the camera you’d ideally choose for your family album memories.
Finally, although the rear- mounted fingerprint sensor was quick and reliable in unlocking the phone, there’s no NFC inside the Spira E3X to enable Android Pay.
It’s a shame about the camera, but there’s surprisingly little here to complain about at this price. Maybe Bush can join the smartphone club after all.
A budget phone, with large storage, long battery life and big screen – shame about the photos