Gadgetory

2015 was definitely the year that great phones got really cheap it seems that the entire year was leading up to this the most bang for your buck smartphone there may be a new king when it comes to budget smartphones with the release of Blue's latest the Blu life 1x second generation hey everybody it's Krystal Laura and this is our review of the Blu life 1x when it comes to budget smartphones you don't really expect much but when first taking the blue life one X out of its box you'll be greeted with a pleasant surprise the life 1 X's frame is made from a high quality aluminum that spinach has been sandblasted to create a nice matte texture this makes with this leathery looking plastic backing that's been coated in a smooth paint layer really helps make this phone feel great in the hand the backing has a soft feel to it making it very grippy especially with little bumps indentations and grooves found throughout it it's also not too big not too thick and not too heavy at all creating a very comfortable one-handed experience now the phone is a little taller than last year's model due to a slightly larger 5.2 inch screen but the 2015 Blu life 1x still manages to look very sleek and have a much more premium feel and look than you would come to expect with such a low price phone you'll find the headphone jack up at the top with the power and value buttons here on the right side they don't have any texture patterns to help distinguish between them we're not looking but they're spaced far enough apart while you'll probably never have any issues the display you'll find here on the blue life 1x is a really beautiful 5.2 inch full HD IPS panel that extra bit of screen real estate makes for a slightly better media consuming experience a pixel density of 424 PPI makes for very sharp text and colors look very nice here this is thanks to Mir vision which is a set of engine so you can toggle on and off within settings it helps enhance the picture quality by mostly boosting colors by default is set to the standard mode but I really do enjoy that you're punching colors so switching to the vivid mode makes for less accurate but more appealing images there's also user mode you can toggle will you'll gain access to basic color tuning like contrast saturation and picture brightness and advanced tuning like sharpness color temperature and dynamic contrast really the standard and vivid color modes will be enough for some but for a full HD IPS LCD screen we were very impressed and loved watching videos on it the display is protected by Corning Gorilla Glass 3 so it should hold up pretty well over time without any drops or Falls so this year's Blu life 1x is available to purchase unlocked and supports dual SIM cards we use ours while connecting to AT&T and didn't have any problems at all while being connected to 4G the majority of the time your New Jersey of course you get to these two SIM cards you'll have to remove that leathery looking back and no you won't find a removable battery here but instead you'll find a micro SD card slot which supports up to a 64 gig card which is a huge feature for some people as most budget phones do not have much internal storage the blue life 1x is no exception as 16 gigs of internal storage is the only available model under the hood we have an octa-core MediaTek mt6752 processor along with a mallet e720 GPU these processors and graphic cards are obviously more so designed for cheaper mid-range phones so you shouldn't expect the One X to dominate when it comes to benchmark ratings but you'll find that this dual of hardware really makes for a great experience with some help from his two gigs around and that's a pretty decent amount of memory for such a cheap device now even with this year's One X being a little thinner than last year's model just by point two millimeters blue managed to cram a battery with 900 milliamp hours of extra capacity 2900 milliamp hours is what you find here which is quite impressive I threw this run through some benchmarks just to give us all an idea of how it ranks up against other phones and Geekbench gave the single core score of 628 with the multi-core score of this octa-core processor being 2854 that's not too shabby really for a phone at this price and just to compare that to one of the most popular budget phones out there right now the Moto G the blue life for Nexus keep and trading nearly doubles it and Tutu's benchmark tests gave it a score of thirty seven thousand eight hundred and twenty two and GFX OpenGL benchmark gave some pretty decent scores for GPU now the most important thing is all this makes for a very responsive and reliable experience when it comes to performance apps launch very fast and without two gigs of RAM multitasking and flying in and out of the recent apps screen is a great experience much better than most budget phones out there when comparing to a flagship smartphone of course you'll notice a bit of an extra pause when clicking the recent apps screen and sometimes the phone may take a second to become responsive when scrolling to webpages but these aren't as common as you would expect with these facts and really they won't break your workflow when doing basic things the phone even holds up well during gaming the most graphic intensive games like asphalt 8 you really get a nice and smooth gameplay experience some frames will drop sometimes but not as much as I first suspected and it doesn't make games harder to play that 2900 milliamp hour battery is a huge improvement over last generations and should definitely get you through the day if you pick up a bunch of smartphone usually won't be doing heavy power user type things with your phone or be a huge gamer or picture taker but I use the phone just as I would use a normal flagship phone gaming here and there taking lots of pictures sending lots of text sending emails to push and without disabling account syncing the phone will continuously last me the full day with four and a half to five hours of screen on time there's no quick or fast charging here unfortunately but it shouldn't be much of a problem because like I said I never found the need to charge my phone other than overnight the Blu life 1x is running Android lollipop 5.1 right out of the box and this is probably blues best software experience yet in the past you never knew what you were going to get when it came to blue software with every new blue smartphone release the software experience look and feel seem totally different from the last sometimes having no app jars or being full of blues versions of standard apps but it seems blue has finally decided on something great the software the One X is very much like stalking Android with a few extra features there hasn't been much rescanning at all the pull down menu is the same although with some extra tiles the recent apps screen is exact same but with a clear all button on the bottom and when diving into settings you won't notice any differences besides these extra menu stores the bottom smart awake allows you to draw different characters on the screen while the phone is off launching different apps like drawing and M launches you prefer music player C launches your camera and launches a flashlight also double tap to wake is present here which is an awesome feature and is extremely underrated of course double tapping to turn off the display is present too but this mode can be found under smart gesture here you can also enable pocket mode which uses a proximity sensor to save battery and some other gestures like flipping the phone over to silence a call or an alarm even the home launcher which they call carefree launcher is quite nice it's very simple and very functional you may not be a fan of the messaging app or keyboard but that's the beauty of the Google Play Store also Blue has previously stated that they are making timely software updates a priority so hopefully that means that we won't have to wait too long until we see Android marshmallow 6.0 on the blue life 1x usually cameras and budget smartphones are nothing special there just in case you really need to snap a picture of something important or take a picture of something for your mom of references and that's pretty much it but recently this is changing especially when it comes to the 1x here we have a 13 megapixel main rear facing camera with phase data autofocus and flash and of course our front-facing selfie cam at 5 megapixels and interesting enough this camera also comes to a flash you're not going to find any optical image stabilization here but with a pretty fast shutter speed in bright areas you shouldn't have too much problems with blurry images the 1xs cameras has pretty much the same pro's and con's that you'd find in most mid-range smartphones with enough light you're consistently going to take really nice photos the images that you'll take will often be quite soft which isn't such a bad thing colors are more subdued compared to most cameras but they still look very nice and in the end you're going to be able to take pictures that you won't feel embarrassed about sharing with people or even posting to social media that's not something you can say with a lot of bunch of smartphones but like I said cheap phones are getting really good these days in every department and the blue life one axis camera is no exception the camera interface is very simple while still having your go to features ready to be clicked around the preview area except one feature I would have liked to have on my fingertips is to talk within a menu and this HDR so you can click this box here to get a ton of nice features like Beauty modes sport modes dual view modes night modes and even a pro mode unless you have just ISO white balance and more so yeah there's no auto HDR so you'll have to dive into this menu every time you want to enable it but it works pretty well it'll most likely bring out the shadows rather than lower the exposures of the skies maybe a little too much but it does add a lot of sharpening we'd say stick with HDR being off usually you get a better photo without it it's hidden under a menu and it does take a while for it to take that picture however in low-light it helps a little all it does is bring up the picture just a tad but it definitely looks better every time just make sure you keep a steady hand because it does take a while there's a night mode too although it takes even longer and you'll have to keep an even more steady hands video looks good allowing up to full 1080p video but make sure you dive into settings to change it to 1080p from the default 720p like the pictures it takes the colors will be more toned down compared to most cameras and it'll be a little cooler rather than it's warmer competition but it really makes for a nice video although a little shaky selfies look quite good with a good amount of detail too and yes we have the front-facing flash which could be helpful in really dark scenarios but most of the time you'll probably want to turn this off because it can be a bit harsh sometimes overall compared to phones in the blue light for Nexus price range the camera here is a lot better than I was expecting and it definitely creates photos and videos worth sharing when it comes to budget smart phones most users will prioritize a lower price over the great hardware or software the phone has but in this case you're getting one of the cheapest phones out there with a great software experience and great internals the Blu life 1x 2015 will only set you back one hundred and forty nine dollars and that's really an amazing price for this phone that has great internal hardware that actually performs a great imploded and on skin softer experience sleek design and a good camera to swing the deal even further blue include some really nice in your earbuds out of the box along with the screen protector and a nice case it actually is more of a clip-on backing so once you remove the leathery plastic backing you can replace it with this the front will cover up the display putting it into a dark mode showing the time along with music player controls with price being the most important when it comes to budget smartphones this second generation blue life 1x is very appealing and with a great hardware that it comes along with this really is one of the best ones you can get right now for under 150 dollars thanks for watching this review comment below and let me know what you think of the Blu life 1x also leave a like because that really helps us out check out these other cool videos on the side here and click up there for our Andrew thority app and last but certainly not least head on over to Android Authority calm for the full in-depth review because we are your source for all things Android