Gadgetory

sometimes if you look hard enough you can find manufacturers you've never heard of right here in the United States and one in particular hails from Miami Florida and looks to bring you a flagship experience for a lower price hey it's Josh Arikara from Android Authority and this is the blue life pure excel now before you ask no this is not to the same company as the maker of those electronic cigarettes but instead blue BL U stands for bold like us and they are certainly trying to be bold it seems like with their choices on this smartphone a 5.5 inch screen dictates the overall size of this device and the design aspect is where blue seemingly decided to keep things pretty simple capacitive Keys line the bottom portion while a phone speaker grown and the front-facing camera are found up top now glossy plastic is what is used quite literally all around this device and there is a curve at the top as well as on the bottom despite the sides being very flat after that you have the headphone jack up top with the power button and on the bottom you have the dual speaker setup along with a micro USB charging port the sides though flat do have the volume rocker on the right side and the SIM tray on the left come around the back and you'll find a slight curve along with the protruding camera up top now it doesn't come out too much but it will take the brunt of any damage if you do tend to slide your phone on tables a lot and that's pretty much it for the material around the device it's covered in glossy plastic and thus it is generally prone to smudges and fingerprints though I will admit that keeping everything to a dark in this case black color does somewhat hide that now I wouldn't say that this is my favorite looking device out there because while I do like simplistic elegance this might be a little bit too simple for its own good someone I knew took the phone and said this feels like a chocolate bar and that's not necessarily a good thing handling is a different matter and it actually isn't too bad on this phone though the glossy plastic does lend itself to some slippage here and there the power button up top might take some hand gymnastics to get to but it isn't too difficult considering the flat sides make it easy to grip and tilt the phone those flat sides also help with the overall grip allowing for a rather comfortable fit when coupled with the curve on back well as is the case with larger screen devices this 5.5 inch screen does provide a little bit more difficult handling when you're trying to reach everything on the top especially so maybe this minimalistic design is not going to turn heads but the Life Pure Excel does get a couple points for having some pretty accessible handling as mentioned above the screen of the blue is a 5.5 inch size and is a 1080p LTPS LCD with 401 pixels per inch now the screen is pretty vibrant and does its job of putting out the pretty colorful OS general tasks such as watching YouTube provided no issues and with the standard pixel density I didn't have any issue viewing or reading text on webpages even playing a game like CSR classics was a breeze on this display as it provided a fun experience with all the colorful cars and graphics all in all this is a display that gets the job done there are real no complaints here and in performance blue wanted to ensure that its larger hands that came with the right specifications to match current top devices in this case I went with the Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 clocked in at 2.2 gigahertz backed by the adrenal 330 and 3 gigabytes of ram the ram portion was a nice touch giving this phone a bit of an edge despite having a processing package that is just one step behind the current bleeding edge but that being said the performance on this phone should be without question but I believe it is bogged down by some shoddy software work even if it's just in the way the animations were built seeing slowdown and stutter and even the small portions of the operating system is pretty disheartening the OS might be just trying to look fancy but its overtures and flourishes sometimes get in the way of truly feeling like a fluid experience and once you get to where you need to go though things pretty seem to perform about as smoothly as I need to gaming in particular post few issues as I was able to enjoy CSR classics easily and then web browsing was really easy and I didn't find any rendering issues on plenty of websites that I view all in all the performance aspect has a just get the job done attitude on the live pure Excel and I did find as I continued to use his device that just getting the job done was generally the motif you would use to describe this device and that does continue in hardware aware there aren't really too many bells and whistles talk about but the life pure Excel does come with everything you would expect from a higher tier device Bluetooth Wi-Fi and of course NFC now it's worth mentioning that this phone is not capable of connecting to LTE network so when it comes to mobile Internet you'll be getting HSDPA instead call quality was pretty standard though I will say that while I sounded alright to the person on the other line I felt the speaker volume on this phone could use a boost in both volume and in clarity I could hear the other person just fine but it doesn't sound as crisp as plain as the other phones out there and speaking of the sound experience those two grills on the bottom simply don't provide a very good stereo experience I would actually argue they don't really provide a stereo experience to begin with actually sound seems to primarily come from only one of the grilles which is easily muffled by a covering finger the sound that comes out of it also isn't particularly crisp though I will say that it does get plenty loud underneath the hood of the live peer XL you get 32 gigabytes of on-board storage and a 2,500 million power battery that does go for a pretty good time now usually connecting to LTE networks is a bit of a battery drain and that is not found here so that might help but after taking a bunch of calls sending a lot of texts doing a lot of navigation with this phone and also taking quite a few pictures that moderate usage did bring this phone down to 25% after about 10 hours which isn't that bad power is also not in shortage when you're talking about the camera after all it's a 16 megapixel shooter that is available in this device starting off with the app though it does provide a few different options but in the end doesn't have that many features to boast HDR scene modes and some control is available what I didn't like about the interface is that when you try to look at the settings it always comes up in portrait mode so when you're in position to take a picture properly but need to change something you have to rotate the phone just to do so it's kind of annoying but when you move to advanced mode the controls do rotate to landscape but then again it's still not that easy to maneuver around the various dials and sliders while you are able to select more minutes parts of the shooting experience like ISO and white balance here the interface again just tries to look fancy and in the end is not all that useful or doesn't allow you a way to change your settings in a very timely manner but the speed of the app is well decent at best as shots are pretty easy to get if you are in the normal shooting mode but do require some extra processing time if basically any extra scene mode is used and as far as quality goes that isn't a great shooter and pales in comparison to just plenty of the cameras out there : reproduction is pretty shoddy as a below-average saturation yields washed out photos in pretty much every instance details are also lacking as is easily demonstrated by this 100 crop noise levels are high enough that subjects don't really get separated well from the rest of the shot so once again we find ourselves in a situation where additions put into the live pure excel are there not because they're going to excel at what they do but because they are basically what is required for this phone to be considered anywhere near the top-tier the operating system found in the live pure excel does get the job done but it's pretty quirky the main striking difference you'll find is the fact that there's no app drawer which is much like a number of Chinese iterations of Android out there all of your applications will be stored on the screens left to be organized by folders also there's no way to put widgets on the home screens so that lends to a lack of customization the background is a little blurred out which is a bit of a stylistic choice that actually makes it look kind of nice but other than that you're greeted with a dock and all of your applications are provided with a lot of pages to swipe through multitasking takes on an interesting method as pressing home on the home screens will bring you a sliding list of your most recent used applications and then you use the HOME key to return to this list and it will allow you to jump between the various apps and another interesting feature fountain here was in the lockscreen which is a simple swipe up unless you swipe to the right where you can get a few functions one of which was being able to initialize the camera which is kind of nice to be able to do so from straight in the lock screen but then another one that allows you to make the phone feign a call in order to get you out of quote unwanted situations as far as apps go the ones built into the blue OS include a power manager for power saving capabilities a a pretty nice-looking music player actually and a different camera if you want those extra effects so based on jellybean the blue OS is actually pretty outdated by now and as far as function goes it does away with the common tropes that Android people will probably be more used to like an app drawer so as a result you will be able to get general tasks done with a built-in user interface but I wouldn't be surprised if you launched a custom launcher as a solution in order to get a more familiar experience priced at 399 dollars on Amazon the blue life peer excel does provide a lower price point compared to plenty of other flagships out there but there are other phones that might be able to beat that price the main ones that come to mind are any flagship devices that came out last year whose prices may have gone down by now but they might not have come down as low as 399 dollars the ones that do come at that price point include the Moto line even though for lower prices you might be paying for a somewhat lower tiered experience comparatively at least in the spec sheets after that you have of course the Nexus 5 which comes in at $349 at its base model and provides a very very good experience with stock Android the way that we want it and then after that you have of course the oneplus one priced in at 299 at its base model but it is still incredibly difficult to get your hands on today so in the end the live pure XL is a phone word you pretty much pay for what you get and what you get in this phone is a device that just does exactly what it's supposed to do but doesn't necessarily excel after that and so there you have it at that price it's really not that bad of a device by any means it just is a phone that pretty accurately fits its retail value while the power of the processor the capable screen and the only decent camera will provide enough for the average user anyone else looking for even a little bit more than that so will probably have their eyes set on other devices at the very least the life peer XL shows that lesser-known manufacturers are definitely capable of providing comparable experiences to more well-known devices but what they need to do now is go above and beyond rather than just do exactly what is expected of their device as always thank you guys very much for watching and I hope you enjoyed this review of the Blu life pure XL while there were some moments of enjoyment when I was used this device unfortunately they paled in comparison to plenty of other devices that overall provide a richer experience but at 399 it is a viable solution for any of you users out there who don't want to pay the premium for any of the other flagship devices out there so keep it tuned to Android authority for all of the best coverage including coverage from my colleagues in Android Joe Jace Kevin the tech ninja and lawn and also remember to hit that like button hit that subscribe button and then hit a bandra thority comm because we are of course your source for all things Android