Gadgetory

hey guys this is Austin is a $60 smartphone worth it but are actually quite a few choices at this price point and to kick things off we've got the Alcatel Pixy 3 get into the unboxing you know find the phone itself the power adapter a pair of headphones which while cheaper a nice inclusion the micro USB cable and the 1780 milliamp hour battery pop the back off the Pixy 3 and you can easily install the battery this is also where you'll find the slots for the some along with the micro SD card up to 32 gigs next up we've got the blue advance 5.0 get into the box and you'll see the phone up front along with the power adapter USB cable and the 18 hundred million power battery the advance immediately looks and feels nicer than the price tag would suggest especially in this white finish pop the back off and you'll see the dual SIM slots which is a nice plus on top of the micro SD which can handle up to a 64 gig card last but not least we've got the ZTE Maven which first glance looks almost identical to the pixi like the others it comes with a micro USB cable power adapter and the removable rear cover the battery isn't replaceable but you can install a 32 gig microSD and the SEM here the real question is what's it like to use a $60 phone actually not bad all three have fairly similar specs with a quad core fairly low powered CPU in android 5.1 you'll notice the occasional bit of slowness compared to a flagship but they're totally usable run a couple benchmarks such as Geekbench and you'll see the pixie and maven pull out a small lead on the CPU side or when you move over to graphics with 3d mark the Maven pulled out a fairly substantial lead one of the most important things to make a phone feel quick as the stores performance and inside the PC Mark storage bench things are close enough to put all three phones right up there with $600 flagships just a few years ago even though the Blu advance is the weakest on paper you'd be hard-pressed to notice the difference in real use most games like bad land run no problem a big part of that has to do with the screens both the pixie and maven are sporting 4.5 inch displays with a resolution of 854 by 480 they're about exactly what you would expect at this price point neither get very bright and the contrast is poor as IPS displays color and viewing angles are passable but neither are any better than tolerable the blue advance is a surprising step up here it has the same fairly low resolution but on a larger 5-inch display that might not look impressive on paper but it's really not bad the color and especially contrast is a massive improvement over the others stand-up - a new high-end display but at this price point there's absolutely nothing to complain about that same praise also carries over to the design of the phone while the advance is a fair bit larger than the others you're getting a phone that could easily pass as something that's far more expensive unlike the hard cheap plastic on the pixi and mavin you get a soft touch fake leather finish on the blue it's also quite a bit thinner than the others which pair with the nicely tapered edges gives that a much nicer feel in the hand all three do have fairly unimpressive rear firing speakers and pretty large bezels which you'll find on screen Android keys on the advanced compared to capacitive keys on the others with all three running android 5.1 the software side is pretty even the blue and Pixies both have very lightly skin build with minimal additions where the Maven has seen larger changes including quite a lot of bloatware the bigger issue is storage where you'll find eight gigs on the Maven the pixie in advance only come with four gigabytes out of the box a microSD card is a good idea for all of these but it's basically a necessity when you've only got four gigabytes to work with it's a similar story when it comes to RAM where the Maven and picks you have a full gigabyte the blue skips a bit here with 768 Meg's of memory this complicates things a bit while the Maven is a better SPECT phone the advanced Bolton feels like a much more expensive device get to the cameras and it gets even more difficult to choose you're looking at five megapixel cameras with an LED flash across the board but here the Maven easily pulls out the wind it's far sharper than the others it does a better job with colour and to top it off it comes with a better camera app that reminds me a bit of the iOS app it even gives you a promo to tweak the settings it's the same story on the video side the advanced has an advantage on paper with 1080p video but again I prefer the look of the 720p video on the Maven one area where the blue scores an easy win is with the front-facing camera as a two megapixel shooter compared to VGA on the others it looks a lot better and that advantage is even more noticeable in video for some reason the pixi Maven record at a basically unusable 7 frames per second on the front-facing camera where the advanced at least keeps up a decent frame rate in a vacuum the pixie is a totally usable phone for 60 dollars but in this company it's simply outclassed the Maven consistently delivers a small performance advantage with more storage and a better rear camera but the advance looks and feels massively better has a screen that's totally respectable and a better selfie camera that makes it absolutely worth it cheap phones have come a long way so which one would you go for let me know in the comments below and I will catch you in the next one