You’ve probably heard that the latest trend in the phone biz is to clone the Xiaomi Mi MIX or at least imitate its design with a very close edge to edge approach. Few companies have been successful with that and some preferred to do their own thing. Out of nowhere came the Bluboo S1, doing a fine job at it, at a mere $170 on Aliexpress.com.
We unboxed the device recently and found the handset to be quite good looking and we loved the way the glass looked at the front and back. It’s 2.5D Glass with Gorilla Glass 4 protection and the narrow bezels upfront are crazy slim. So much so, that the front camera had to be moved on the “chin”. Also on the chin is the fingerprint scanner.
Inside the handset’s box there’s the charger, USB Type-C cable, case, manual, metal key and USB Type-C to 3.5 mm adapter. No headphones here, by the way. Bluboo S1 measures 7.9 mm in thickness, weighs 175 grams and runs on Android 7.0 with a tweaked UI. The device is not only a looker, but also pretty well specced, with a MediaTek Helio P25 CPU, 4 or 6 GB of RAM and 64 GB of storage.
The screen is a 5.5 inch Full HD panel made by Sharp and we also get a 3500 mAh battery, microSD card slot and a dual back camera with 13 MP + 3 MP sensor. Upfront there’s a 5 MP shooter. Both sets of cameras go to 16 and 8 MP respectively via interpolation. On paper we are promised a screen to body ratio of 90%, but I wouldn’t bet on it.
Available in black or white, this smartphone really made a good impression on me. Will it last after the tests and benchmarks are done? Find out in a week or two! In the meantime you can get the device here.
