Exterior and display

It’s flashy in the device’s price range, at least from the front, because the back cover isn’t an adrenaline bomb. Grasped by hand, it will soon be striking that the stuff is quite a serious individuality (about 180 grams), the silicones included no longer add to it, but it doesn’t make it any easier. The X18 Plus is not unibody, Cubot is not the biggest name in the business, but there is nothing wrong with the quality of the assembly. The glossy back cover is a great fingerprint magnet in its order and manner, while the aluminum frame around the side was a pleasant surprise, although we won’t notice much of it because of the case. As usual, you will find the power button on the right, the volume control, and the SIM and memory card on the other side. It would have been worth leaving a bit more space than the right-hand controls, there would have been plenty of room for that. The coffee is perfectly fine on both sides, it is a bit thicker at the bottom and top, in this price category it can already be considered good. The 3,5mm jack socket was not spared either.

Clearly, the 5,99-inch IPS display is the largest trump card. The brightness is great (satisfactory even in strong sunshine, though we have to roll it up carefully for this), the colors are remarkably strong, 403 ppi is more than enough. Perhaps the only beauty flaw of the panel is the response time, we know full well that IPS is not brilliant in this area. By the way, at Gearbest, customers literally talked about it in superlatives (“awesome, very beautiful, breathtaking, beautiful”), so at this point we can engrave a fat red dot. We have one more duty: the responsiveness is amazingly good, the stuff registers our touches with lightning speed, it does it all so easily that sometimes I already feel like I don’t even understand it.

As for the protection of the display, the good thing is that it has a screen protector on it at the factory, and it is loaded so nicely that I certainly would not be able to - we will return here a little later. To our knowledge, the display-to-front ratio is 79,63%. Surprisingly, due to the 2: 1 aspect ratio, the X18 Plus is easy to use even with such a large display. And below you can see a hardcore version of the unboxing genre.

Hardware and operating time

The 64-bit MT28T with 6750-nanometer manufacturing technology alone will not be the eighth wonder of the world, at this (price) level, such performance should already be brought in 2018. What’s really steely is the size of RAM and ROM: the former is 4GB and the latter kicks in at 64GB. Add to that the fact that Cubot delivers the Android 8.0 release (almost) intact, we don’t even find unnecessary apps with a magnifying glass, so the system will run without exaggeration. The biscuit miracle, according to the lessons from the developer menu, ran with an average of 2,5 GB of memory (59% utilization), counting 1,3 GB of free memory - all with 2 days of use and factory apps. So I’m really curious about how Android Oreo (Go edition) can deliver on Google’s promises, because the base version obviously doesn’t take up memory, even though Cubot didn’t pack the system with a bit of extras. 

It is likely that few will run out of the internal memory, because of the naked system, the empty storage space is a bit more than 57 GB (!) After the first run. The sequential reading time has no complaint (~ 260 MB / s), but the write pace is not sensational (~ 100 MB / s).

The Mali-T860 MP2 is theoretically designed for Full HD resolution, yet with some black magic it also moves 2160 × 1080 pixels nicely. Aging IGP isn’t bad for your knowledge yet (OpenGL ES 3.1, OpenCL 1.2, and DirectX 11.1), so you won’t retire the console in the living room. The system chip offers an eight-core, more precisely 2 × 4 processor: Cortex-A53 cores at 1,5 GHz (power-centric) and 1,0 GHz (energy-saving). Not so surprisingly, SoC is a bit moaning with the latest games, they are e.g. they don’t have a problem yet: Dead Trigger 2, Asphalt 8: Airborne, Modern Combat 5. Anyway, we don’t necessarily have to stick to the best visual display, and then the display will be smoother right away. After half a day of “crushing,” Oreo produced the first situation in which he thought about things in life for a moment (for a moment). So fast. Very. 

The fans of the synthetic measuring programs are made with a little taste:

• AnTuTu: ~ 55 points
• Geekbench: ~ 650 / 2 700 point

Using the 4000 mAh battery in energy-saving mode, I squeezed out nearly 4 hours of screen time, dropping the charge from 80% to 40% - obviously not by accident I looked at this point in this domain. Your user selects the average availability time for crushing somewhere between 6 and 7 hours. Note, besides the games, you can also use the energy-saving scheme by default, because there is no difference between browsing, video and spitting in the system. To support this, I've upgraded a SunSpider 1.0.2 JavaScript benchmark:

• 1 801 ms (energy saving mode)
• 1 807 ms (high performance mode)

You see, the difference is so much within the margin of error that the web page shows that the performance-centric setting was slower. The snooping mode is GUI-level, actually, much slower, as it's obviously omit the animations. 

In terms of uptime, Oreo was an excellent choice, and Google has done a lot in this version as well (checking applications running in the background and foreground more closely) to keep availability as long as possible. This is probably (also) due to the fact that the X18 Plus loses only 1% of capacity overnight - with a saving scheme. In any case, the envelope is that it is not easy to lay within a day, although with a daily charge it is at least easy to keep the battery voltage between the ideal range (40-80%). With the axine, it is not worth overstretching the string - that is, dancing between 0 and 100% all the time - because it is not replaceable, so let's start with the assumption that the device will not lie down after two years. The charger breathes life into the device at 5 volts with a current of 2 amps, which requires more than two hours to operate.

The software

As mentioned above, the Cubot did not really force itself at this point. The biscuit system therefore carries only the bases, at least with the necessary stability and speed. To utmost concern, the interface tuning menu (System Tuner UI) could not be activated.

system Applications

• Beállítások
• file Manager
• files
• FM radio
• Photos
• Gallery
• voice Recorder
• Camera
• Messages
• Calendar
• Contacts
• Watch
• Calculator
• Phone
• Messages
• Wireless Update

Google

• Chrome
• Drive
• duo
• Photos
• gmail
• Google
• Gboard
• play store
• Play Movies
• Play Music
• YouTube
• Map

 

The list above is missing eg. the stopwatch and the timer, they are in the usual place in Clock app.

 

Camera

The back camera shoots 20 megapixel images, while the sensor is reported to be 16 MP, hence the highest interpolated resolution available. The secondary sensor is 2 megapixels - we wouldn't bet a lot on this - it theoretically shows its capabilities using the Blur effect. In theory, because in practice, I didn’t really see a difference when I covered this auxiliary camera - the same is true for pictures taken in black and white mode. Either way, there is a very strong suspicion that the bokeh effect is produced by software manipulation. There is also some software support for the front panel camera, here 8 MP material will result in a 13 MP final result. Due to the considerable prominence of the lens, it is worth using a / a case.

It is worth adding to the above pictures that the photographer was lost very deeply in me, he could not even find him. In any case, it soon became clear that the sensor (unfortunately unknown from the supplier) was quite sensitive to light conditions. Ideally, it hits a level we’re not ashamed of on social media; the richness of detail and color reproduction (in this case) can be considered good. In the absence of adequate lighting, however, the images will easily become noisy, and in some cases the dynamic range also leaves something to be desired. Overall, it is acceptable, and it was obvious that we will not shoot the photo of the year with this. The focus could be smarter, the finished images take on average 4-5 MB.

X18 Plus offers the following picture modes:

• panorama
• face
• HDR
• Pro
• Mono
• default
• Blur

We also made a test video, recording the video in Full HD with 30 fps.

sounding

The mono speaker on the bottom of the device is capable of correct volume at mid-range, but its quality is absolutely satisfactory, but you should not expect significant bass from it. Totally suitable for Youtube video recording. The microphone was so sensitive that it could even interpret the whisper 4 times out of 3.

Kapcsolatok

Dual SIM is available when microSD expansion is not used, which is not a big deal with this amount of storage. According to the manufacturer's instructions, the device can access the entire domestic 4G / LTE frequency band (1800 MHz (B3), 2600 MHz (B7) and 800 MHz (B20)), WiFi of course has spoken with their 802.11 b / g / n gadgets (in the 2,4 GHz range) and can also act as a hotspot. Bluetooth version 4.0 is also standard, as is AGPS and GPS. Cubot gave up the gyroscope and the magnetic sensor for a mysterious reason, which we definitely thought was worth noting. There is no NFC or infrared.

The fingerprint reader, according to the specifications, promises 0,1 seconds resolution, which is, of course, a peculiar manifestation of humor; the reality is roughly about 1 seconds around. There were no problems with accuracy.

Support

Personally, I like to try on a particular product as a manufacturer's background. Now that's what I've got, because there are many issues that I have. Let's look at the answers to these questions:

1. Engineers have not yet decided on the availability of the Android 8.1 upgrade.
2. The respondent did not understand my question about the System UI Tuner feature.
3. There is an incorrect answer to this question, the screen saver is not used for the volume key + power combination.
   
4. The Cubot X18 Plus display is not protected by Gorilla Glass, which is why the manufacturer recommends glass foil.
5. Here, in my opinion, I got a doubtful answer again, according to support, the auxiliary camera is activated with the bokeh effect.

Cue

We’re not in an easy position to evaluate the Cubot X18 Plus, at least certainly not when we consider Gearbestes pricing; the commercial price of the stuff would be $ 169, yet we saw it for a long time with a price tag of $ 149. As the field is very dense at this price level, this $ 20 difference can also improve a lot, as it doesn't really matter whether the LEAGOO KIICAA MIX is the countertop or the MAZE Alpha X. Aside from this, we can say that the manufacturer is a has put a great phablet on the desktop: the operating system is fast and up-to-date, the MTK6750T SoC with so much memory is capable of a deceptive pace, and the display has become truly dazzling. Cubot is by no means one of the high end brands, in any case we had no complaints about it, we did not encounter any serious anomalies during the extensive one-week test. Obviously, the system isn't perfect, the Oreo left English for one or two menu items (such as fingerprint and LED notification indicator), and on the first charge, the software deactivated the charge percentage display for some reason, and then luckily it behaved well. 

We cannot go without the negatives without a word either; the X18 Plus has sensor shortcomings and unfortunately no NFC - you can still live with them. The screen protector is also a weakness as Gorilla Glass no longer ran on glass. With a background in support, everyone has to decide for themselves what level they are willing to take, we have tried to gather some information on our part to make it easier for you to decide.

The Cubot X18 Plus is currently available on Gearboston (click on the picture!), With a total price of $ 159,99 (again discounted!). If you have any questions, don't hesitate to ask!

If you run out of Gearbest, you will also find it on the TomTop site and you will get Duty Free shipping mode free of duty and VAT free of charge here: Cubot X18 Plus

Update!

This product is subject to long-term testing, so we report some developments from time to time. We hope that this will give you a fuller picture, and that we will be able to answer your questions more accurately and better. We've put together a few interesting things that we've come across after the test came out, or they might be useful to you in some other way: 

• The factory foil collects fingerprints quite "nicely" - in other respects it has no problem with it - here you will find a good bottle of glass.
• If you are charging the phone in the supplied silicone case, it is not advisable to force the gadget in "feeding", as there is some warming in this case.
• With the task changer button, you can call up the RAM Optimizer - this essentially closes the running applications. Well, since the system is fairly prudent with memory (worse, there is no memory around 1,0 GB), so it's not worth using this (often) with the operating time.
• The factory YouTube app has been recommended to be updated soon, because it seldom successfully erases the background image - he thinks this is the main guilty one, but that is not entirely certain.
• The developer menu does not appear by default, as usual (taping on the Build Number menu).
• The display of battery time is accurate, but the "statistics since full upload" can create fun moments, for example. Abnormal Above 100%.
• Let's take a try with the "accessibility options" to make the font size big and the size of the display small! This will help us achieve that the virtual keypad and status bar will be somewhat smaller, so the useful screen surface will increase. Because increasing the font size will provide enough compensation, there will be no readability.
• The automatic dimmer just goes out of the way, if you want to give a bit of time, then use the manual control.
• Take it out of the case if you are subjected to heavy loads (such as prolonged use of the camera) in the summer sun, as its internal cooling is not the brightest point!