CUBOT X19 S

CUBOT X19 S – The King of the Mid-end Smartphone under $100

Cubot should be familiar to anyone who is interested in China mobile phones. The brand is particularly well known in the entry-level segment, as it mainly covers the price range between 100 and 200 USD. Lately it has become a bit quieter around Cubot, which is probably also due to the fact that the quality has noticeably decreased during the last few years. There were more and more negative test results and the equipment of the smartphones left more and more to be desired. So you certainly scared away some customers. But now Cubot wants to celebrate a comeback and has introduced its first smartphone in 2019. The Cubot X19 S is better equipped than you would expect from Cubot, but still doesn’t cost much money.

For the money the customer gets a smartphone with full view display and glass back. The latter is available in plain black or with a colour gradient and shows changing lines depending on the incidence of light. The glass is framed by a solid metal frame. The back has a fingerprint sensor and a dual camera. This offers a 16MP main sensor with f/2.0 aperture, a 2MP secondary sensor and supports PDAF. The front camera resolves with 8MP. The lack of a Notch might be pleased so some prospective customers.

The LCD display is quite small at 5.93 inches by today’s standards and works with a resolution of 2160 x 1080 pixels. The brightness reaches up to 450cd/㎡ and is therefore sufficient for outdoor use. A Helio P23 processor with 2.0GHz offers sufficient performance for the lower middle class. The chip is flanked by 4GB RAM and 32GB memory. A Micro SD card is supported, but occupies one of the two SIM slots. The package is powered by a 4000mAh battery. A headphone connection is available.

On paper, the Cubot X19 S cuts a good figure for the small price. We like the fact that the manufacturer almost completely dispenses with unnecessary frills. This gives us hope that this is a comparatively good product. It will be important for the Cubot X19 S that the camera performance is right. Whether the dual camera is real or not should not matter to most people in the price range. But the single camera performance has to be right. The same applies to the software optimization, of course, where Cubot once shone reliably. If there are no further gross mistakes, the Cubot X19 S could develop into an insider tip.

The X19 S looks like the youth version of the X19. The only difference is two places: First, the processor is changed from MT6763T 2.5GHz to MT6763 2.0GHz. Second, the memory combination has changed from 4GB RAM 64GB ROM to 4GB RAM 32GB ROM. In fact, the overall performance has not decreased much, but the price will be much lower, let us wait and see.

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