We were among the first to try out one of the latest strapatphones.

Introductory

Chinese manufacturers have moved in two main directions when developing phones. Some of them make devices designed for everyday use, including those with real state-of-the-art hardware, while others see the niche in mobiles with special capabilities. The latter tend to have weaker hardware than mid- or upper-mid-range traditional mobiles, but they tick off competitors such as the Xiaomi in other capabilities.

Cubot is also one of the manufacturers that doesn’t even try to break the top, but they produce extremely fair lower-middle-end mobiles for those who like a traditional device, and really special mobiles for those for whom the usual hardware isn’t suitable for some reason. They have little battery life, maybe live a lifestyle, do a job where it’s more important for their phone to withstand the rigors than to get a crazy high score in one of the test programs.

In this article, we present two phones, though, we could only test one, the more expensive one. These two phones are siblings of each other, equally protected from physical influences, but the cheaper ones have slightly weaker hardware. In return, we get an amazingly good price for this weakness, which puts the bulk of the field on the strapphone behind it.

So let's see what the world's thinnest shockproof phones know!

Packaging and accessories

The shape of the Cubot Quest box is a flat, roughly square piece, but instead of the usual and a bit perhaps an exaggerated solution, it’s just big enough to fit the phone and accessories in a tight fit. But, as they say, many good accessories can fit in a small space, even if you have a phone next to them. There are playful, colorful non-cigarette patterns running on the roof, which I don’t understand the reason for, nor is the phone’s use or design playful, but not in the slightest. If it was already colored, it could have been wearing big colored gears or whatever, but that’s not it.

Turning the box over in nice gold letters, we find the main specifications like display, proci and camera capabilities, but first of course the most important capability, IP68 water and dust resistance, appears first. The black gold pairing is impressive, even though I knew what would be written there as a good nebula I read everything all the way to the last letter.

Lifting the lid is the phone on the right and the compartment hiding the accessories on the left. We get instructions for the phone and an installation description, as well as a thank you card for buying a Cubot phone. The latter gesture always goes well, even when I buy a phone from China, and even when I pop into the Billa for the Austrians for a box of eggs.

When you open the accessory case, a needle falls out of the SIM card door, you will also find a Type-C cable and a charging head. Nowadays, phones are usually supplied with a factory case and back cover, but the Quest is protected by the cover, the extra protection would be unnecessary.

External

When I slipped the phone out of the antistatic bag the first thing I thought was that it was really thin. It's thin, I mean, among the long-distance phones, because we wouldn't dare say a 8,8 millimeter-thick phone is filigree anyway, it's just average. Of course, in the case of long-distance telephones, the value system is different. So compared to that, Quest is really very thin, even surprisingly!

The point is that with a thickness of less than an inch, the Quest is really very skinny, and that feeling isn’t spoiled by its weight either, as it weighs only 18 decades. The designers also played a bit on the thinness by gently brushing the edges of the back cover where our hands touch it, making the rim thinner than the phone itself. Not only is this good for the sight, but it is also more comfortable to catch that way.

The back cover is not the most common sight. The oversized screws and thick cover dominate everything, but the brutal, forceful look is topped off with a shovel by the camera layout, the square fingerprint sensor and pictograms of sports “engraved” in the rubber underneath. Running, cycling and swimming appear here. I understand all three, water resistance when swimming, but I don’t know there are any people who go swimming by phone. Anyway, let's not stick to that, the point is sportiness! In connection with the back cover, I even have to highlight the red inserts, which is echoed in other parts of the housing as well.

The physical buttons are in the usual place on the right. It is worth mentioning here that the power button, unlike the others, is made of metal, but more importantly, there are protruding cams on each side, which have the role of preventing the button from being accidentally pressed. The SIM tray is on the left side, with the camera above the display, as well as the speech speaker in its usual position. There’s no notch here, neither elongated nor drop-shaped, all given the old-school layout, but it’s no wonder, with a strapatphone, the framelessness hits back hard if dropped.

It is particularly interesting that there is a button on the left side of the phone, under the SIM tray. The manufacturer calls this a “Costume Button”, which means that it is a multi-purpose switch. We can add one-button photography or one-button payment here, but we can also activate the assistant with it.

The USB Type-C connector is located on the bottom edge under an openable rubber cover, this cover is what closes the water from the contact.

IP68 water and dust resistance as well as impact protection

• IP6x - Fully protected against dust
• IPx8 - Can also be used underwater, up to a depth of one meter for one hour
• Impact resistance: break protection when dropped from a height of 1 meter
• Thermal protection: Remains usable between -55 and + 70 degrees Celsius
• Water protection: waterproof USB connector, waterproof SIM card tray, underwater camera

Red motifs and inserts return everywhere on the cover. On the front panel at the microphone and speaker, sideways around metal sheets bolted to the side for stiffening and impact protection, essentially along the edges. If, however, you like it, if your phone isn’t very eye-catching, you can also opt for the black version, in which both the inserts and the rubber bands are black, making it less sporty, in return for a much more discreet look.

I can only praise the appearance of the Quest. Visibly, noticeably rugged, but still light and showy due to its thinness and red inserts.

Hardware

I don’t want to go into much detail about the hardware. The headunit is manufactured by MediaTek, and the well-proven Helio P22 chip resides in the mobile with its 2 GHz clock and eight cores, offering decent performance. The built-in PowerVR GE8320 video controller fits well with the proci in performance, with the 650 MHz unit drawing pixels pretty quickly. We get 4 GB of memory in an LPDDR3 module, along with 64 GB of built-in storage.

The table below shows the force relationships well. The HOMTOM HT70 central unit is the oldest, as can be seen from the results. Cubot Power, on the other hand, got a direct successor to the Helio P22 working in Cubot Quest, and the numbers make it clear which is the more muscular piece. The Helio P22 is no longer the youngest development, but it should definitely be rewarded with the fact that it consumes little and is really a proven unit that has been tried and used by many manufacturers, and its power is enough for a rugged phone!

Display

The display in this phone is HD + resolution based on IPS technology. We could say that a 720 x 1440 pixel marker is a bit slim, but as our recent Xiaomi Redmi 7 article revealed, a good IPS is good at this resolution as well. Plus, with this phone, the display has a screen diagonal of just 5,5 inches, which results in a nice value for pixel density despite the relatively low resolution, meaning there will be no wrinkled lines and blurred edges.

Anyway, the display performed really well during use. The brightness is enough even in sunny weather, although it no longer shines, but it stays usable in bright light. The colors, viewing angles, dynamics, contrast are all fine, but this is not particularly surprising for an IPS panel.

We get everything we need from sensors, but not extras like an air pressure gauge. True, such specialties tend to only appear in a higher price range, but I would have been happy to have a tiny spice for the otherwise really great device. However, there is also a proximity sensor, a light sensor, an accelerometer, a gyroscope and a geomagnetic sensor, and I have already mentioned the fingerprint sensor above. The ability to connect to the sensors is even the face-based screen resolution, though that’s more to the credit of the front panel camera than anything else.

Camera

If we are already at the cameras, let's continue with these!

We know essentially nothing about the front panel camera other than that the sensor is 8 megapixels in it. Not bad, no not very good, but selfie kings and queens won’t buy this phone for themselves anyway. The back camera doesn't look bad at all based on the factory data. Under the six-member lens system is a 12-megapixel Sony IMX 486 sensor, complete with a 2-megapixel auxiliary camera that functions as a depth sensor here.

Although the resolution is not too high, we know very well that the resolution has little to do with the quality of the images taken, more precisely because the resolution is high and the image can still be poor. The excitement of the Cubot Quest is that the camera has been given an exceptionally good f / 1.8 aperture value by the manufacturer, which means that the sensor gets a lot of light, which is one of the most important criteria for really good photos. be prepared. You can also see the quality of the pictures by looking at the photos below.

Szoftver

The phone comes with Android version 9, essentially unchanged, as Google figured it out. This also applies to the entire interface, menus, icons, and camera, so I can’t write too much about this. The power of the hardware is obviously plenty enough to move the system, so there is no sign of a jam, everything works nicely smoothly.

Instead of even more words, let's follow a few, more precisely nine pictures. Since a picture is worth a thousand words, feel free to imagine a complete article here!

Other skills

There are a few more things I didn’t mention, we’re running through these headlines right now. The built-in battery has a capacity of 4000 mAh, which is very decent, allowing for up to one and a half to two days of operation on a single charge under normal use. Of course, by pressing a lot, it will be less than that, but one day it will still stick. Using a little, the standby time is significantly extended, but again, I didn’t say anything new.

If you find the built-in storage is low, you can expand it with a memory card with a maximum capacity of 128 GB, but in this case you have to give up the possibility of using a second SIM card, because the tray can hold either two SIM cards or one SIM + one memory card.

We get the usual ones from radios. Wi-Fi is a dual-channel piece that supports the n standard and can be used on both 2,4 GHz and 5 GHz networks. Bluetooth is the 4.2 solution, and we have support for GPS satellites for navigation. It is important that the phone also knows the B20 800 MHz LTE band used at home, so we can use 4G mobilnet without any problems. It is gratifying that the NFC function has not been left out of this phone either, so if our bank also supports the thing, we can also use the phone for payment, thus completely replacing our credit card.

Cubot Quest Lite

Let’s also say a few words about the younger sibling that got the Lite designation!

What matches the two phones is the cover, more specifically all the water, dust and shock protection we also find in the bigger brother. And from here on, almost everything will be different.

The casing itself is a little different, though not significantly. The design is the same, but the power button, for example, is not metal, but a traditional, rubber-covered piece. The device looks a bit different from the side, the corners are different, but it's really not significant, the difference is more indicative. The display has a diagonal of 5 inches, which is smaller but also has a lower resolution of 1280 x 720 pixels. The processor is weaker because although it works in a 2 GHz piece, it only has four cores. Less memory, 3GB found in it, and halved the storage, the Lite only has 32GB of capacity. Luckily, we can put a 128GB memory card in it too, so that’s no problem.

The battery has also become smaller, the 3000 mAh capacity can be said to be average. The camera is also worse with something. The manufacturer says we have a 13 megapixel Sony sensor, but the aperture value in this case is only f / 2.2, which can’t be called too good.

I asked my Gearbestes colleagues to photograph me with Cubot Quest Lite and also take some test shots with it. Honestly, I was expecting a much worse result. Unfortunately, they had rainy weather, so there was no trace of sunshine, but from that the colors are still in place, the images are quite sharp, I don't see any distortion, so it's definitely better than I expected from the hardware specification.

This phone represents the entry level in all respects in terms of hardware, yet it is considered a very good reception. Strap phones with similar irons start at $ 140-150, but Cubot Quest Lite is priced at just $ 119,99 in the current introductory promotion, which is not only simply good, but very good.

Summary

When summarizing an article, we look for answers to two things. One is whether the phone is suitable for daily use, the hardware is strong enough for the tasks, the camera, GPS and other units work well, the other is whether the price-performance ratio is right. The answer to the latter question is simpler, the prices are clearly good, so there is no problem with that. The answer to the first question is a little more complicated because the performance of both the camera and the hardware is decent, though not outstanding.

Of course, for a strapatphone, if not the last but definitely less important aspect is the strength of the hardware, the more important is how much it resists physical influences. Honestly, I didn’t throw my cell phone, but luckily on the net we always find people who don’t make a problem out of it and loosely throw their cell phone out of an upstairs window into a fountain, put it in the fridge to freeze it in an ice block and then put it on the gas to thaw. I also included a tossing video in the article, which serves as some proof for us.

What’s clear, though, without a toss, is that the Cubot engineers did a miracle, and not for the first time. It has long been proven that a full-size battery with a capacity of 6000 mAh can be inserted into a very thin housing, but in the case of the Quest, another shovel has been added for this. The phone has gotten really amazingly slim, I don’t really understand how such a thick, shockproof housing with a 4000 mAh battery could fit into a 8,8mm thick. The mobile is surprisingly thin.

If we already appreciate the appearance, I smuggle my own, completely subjective opinion here as well. Cubot Quest is a surprisingly good piece. You must know the feeling when we pick up something, in our case a phone, and even before we turn it on, we feel that the stuff is of good quality. And I’m not just saying that, it really is. I’m not saying that Quest is uniquely good, I’d rather say that it is only in the top third of the quality among the long-distance phones. That feeling isn’t even given by a lot of $ 200+ mobiles, and believe me, I already had a few strap phones in my hand, so I pretty much know what I’m talking about. Honestly, I was a little unsure because I ordered this phone for a test, but it could easily be that the other, otherwise quite good strapamobil will be sold. I use them on motorcycle tours because I don't like to pack them in a waterproof bag, but they don't get soaked that way, and they can withstand the constant vibration of motorcycling, even if I drop them, the chances of the screen shattering are less. So I definitely have a place for a long distance phone !.

The introductory campaign of Cubot Quest and Quest Lite didn’t end too long ago, but Gearbest, true to its good habit, didn’t raise prices back to the old level. In my experience, this usually happens when the sale of a given device starts better than usual at the discounted price. I have no doubt that this is the case with Cubot Quest and Quest Lite, because they are really cheap, and now I know that Quest is even very good.

For now, both phones are $ 30 cheaper than the original price, so the Cubot Quest is now priced at $ 179,99 instead of $ 149,99, while the Cubot Quest Lite is priced at $ 44 instead of $ 000. dollars (~ 149,99 HUF). Of course, a duty- and VAT-free delivery called Priority Line is available for both phones, which is now also free!

The bottom line, then, is that Quest, and certainly Quest Lite, is enough for everyday use. Those who live a vigorous, sporty lifestyle will be absolutely good, as they will have a good chance of withstanding the brutal strain and physical impacts that an average phone would have long since moved to eternal hunting grounds. Is it worth buying? At normal prices, they would essentially fit into the field average, but the discounted promotional prices make them a very attractive choice. If you feel you need a phone with similar capabilities, think about buying these I think this low price will stay until the end of May now, but I don’t even know what will happen after that.

If you liked the phone, you can buy it here:

Hungarian language webshop:

Cubot Quest Lite 3/32 GB - $ 149,99 instead of $ 119,99

Cubot Quest 6/64 GB - $ 179,99 instead of $ 149,99

English language webshop:

Cubot Quest Lite 3/32 GB - $ 149,99 instead of $ 119,99

Cubot Quest 6/64 GB - $ 179,99 instead of $ 149,99

Don't forget to choose free Priority Line shipping for duty free shipping!