hey everybody you fly inside but now we’re taking a look today at a rather unique smartphone this is called the you know hurts atom it is probably one of the smallest smartphones you will ever see but it’s got most of the modern accoutrements you’ve come to expect from a modern smartphone it’s running Android 8.1 it’s got a decent amount of RAM and storage and it’s not all that expensive at around 260 dollars and we’re going to be taking a closer look at this little phone in just a second but I do want to let you know in the interest of full disclosure that I paid for this with my own funds all the opinions you’re about to hear are my own nobody is paying for this review nor has anyone reviewed or approved what you’re about to see before it was uploaded so let’s get into it now and see what this little phone is all about so let’s take a closer look now at the hardware this is a tiny little phone as I mentioned and you can see it here stacked on top of my iPhone 10 so you can imagine that some of those larger Android phones will certainly tower over this little guy it kind of reminds me of a few phones that I’ve used in the past namely my all-time favorite flip phone which was called the motorola Vader it almost feels exactly in my hand the same way that old Motorola phone did the other one is a bunch of next telephones I used to use in my day job many years ago that were ruggedized and really solid feeling this has that same feel and even have a push-to-talk button if you want to subscribe to the Zelo service I didn’t try that out because I have nobody to talk to you on it but you have that option to do some push-to-talk and it might work well in commercial environments where you might need that now the phone is IP 68 rated which means that it is water and dust resistant so it can survive for example getting dropped into a bucket or a snow bank or something for a short period of time but it’s not designed to be an underwater phone so just bear that in mind inside it’s got a cortex a53 processor it’s the MT 6 7 6 3 chipset octa-core 2 gigahertz and clock speed 4 gigs of ram which might be overkill given the tiny little screen on
this guy and 64 gigs of ram and again the price point is two hundred and fifty nine dollars the display is IPS and as you can see it is very Tinie with some pretty big bezels 2.45 inches and it’s 240 by 432 in resolutions so this is not going to knock your socks off in image quality the display though is relatively functional although it’s sometimes hard to get exactly what you’re looking to type in here so for example I’m going to type out the NASA home page here and provided you’re very precise with your finger you can generally type out what you’re looking for but it is going to sometimes register the wrong key so I think for a lot of text input you’ll probably want to talk to the phone and have Google do the voice to text for you but generally it seems to be working pretty well I was surprised by how well the Android apps actually run on a screen this small so we’re browsing the web here without an issue we can go back to the home page here and maybe load up Plex or something and get a feel for media on this as well so I haven’t found many of the apps that I typically use not working that well on here they all seem to be pretty functional I can click on this to start up a movie again for example and stream it over my Wi-Fi and it seems to be actually working like you would expect one of these little smart phones to work even YouTube was a pretty nice experience on this little tiny screen so if you’re looking for a kind of like a supplementary phone and thinking I’d
like something smaller for those times where I don’t want to risk my smart phone out on a hike or something like that but you still want access to some of these things the fact is all these apps work and they get shrink you know shrunken down into these little windows here but they do seem to work pretty well the sound quality out of the speakers as tinny as you might expect but you can hear it it’s nice and loud and most of the apps work like they do on larger higher resolution screens now we did test battery life on this and it feels about the same as other loads of mid-range smartphones we have tested so you could probably get a day or so out of it depending on what you’re doing and how far you are from the cell towers for example I was surprised that it supports a number of carriers here in the US including Verizon Wireless which is something that we don’t typically see some of these lower end smartphones supporting so you can do Verizon here in the you AT&T and t-mobile it does not though work with Sprint so just keep that in mind but it did work great on Verizon I was able to get my LTE service going on it you do have to make sure you’re plugging in an already activated SIM card on Verizon because this device will not activate a SIM card for you but otherwise it was working fine with my existing service I also tested it with an AT&T SIM card and that worked you can install two SIM cards in here they are micro Sims and you can switch between them or assign one SIM card to voice the other one to data if you wish so you have
all that flexibility you might have seen on other two sim devices that are out there voice quality when you’re actually on the phone wasn’t great the speaker sounded fine when I called my wife on it but she said I sounded a little bit muffled when I was talking to her so you might want to look at plugging in a headset or getting a Bluetooth headset now this has two cameras onboard one on the front and one on the back the rear camera is the better of the two it’s a 16 megapixel camera with a flash it’s not a spectacular camera though it will take decently sharp photos but it doesn’t have any stabilization so if you’re in lower light that will result usually in a blurry or photo it’ll do video at 1080p at 30 frames per second but again that lack of a stabilizer makes it really difficult to do any kind of moving shots here so it’s not going to compete at all with a higher-end smartphone with a nicer camera the camera on the front is 8 megapixels not spectacular but good enough to do a selfie every once in a while or do a video conference or something like that next to it you can see the little message indicator light flashing there we have a notification waiting that we will see
when we turn it back on it does have a fingerprint sensor which is kind of neat to see on a little device like this so you can see when I just turned it back on that fingerprint was recognized and allowed us to unlock the phones so that that’s been working pretty nicely most of the time except when it’s on camera apparently let me get a better angle on that there we go but I have found the fingerprint sensor to work fairly well as I’ve been playing with the phone here you have your usual back end multitasking buttons here on the device and you can also use that fingerprint sensor as a home button you’ll get a bit of haptic feedback when you push it in like other Android phones there’s that sim tray I mentioned volume up and down over here and then on the other side you have the power switch and the push-to-talk button and then it charges via USB type-c and I try to add a bunch of different devices to see if we can get maybe video coming out of this unfortunately you cannot get video out through the USB see but it does support card readers it even works with keyboards and mice too so I’ve got my little USB dongle here with a Logitech thing plugged into it so if we pop that into the side of the phone here and I start using the mouse on my device you can actually see the mouse pointer moving on the little tiny phone here using this USB C hub so I think you could probably plug in some basic devices like game controllers and keyboards and mice and that sort of thing but do not expect to be able to get video out from the phone which is unfortunate because that might have extended its usability a little bit if you could plug it in maybe to a larger display when you needed to do something else and it has a traditional headphone jack here at the top for
plugging in a headset or just headphones so that was nice to see on there and overall it pretty nicely put together package a weight on it is about 108 grams or three and a half ounces so pretty lightweight also but it does feel pretty solid let’s take a look now at some gaming now gaming on this little phone is going to be a challenge given the small screen size and how your fingers will be taking up most of the screen to try to control the game but nonetheless the frame rate here is pretty good even on something like goat simulator here which is a 3d open-world game I think some of the performance we’re seeing here is due in part to the low resolution display this processor is not a super powerful but on a little low resolution display doesn’t have to work as hard to render the scene so it’s really running quite nicely actually it’s just really difficult to control so I think you’ll have a decent time playing most of the casual games you’ll find in the Google Play Store just know though that controlling those games is going to be a bit challenging and on the 3dmark sling shot benchmark test we got a score of 674 that puts it right around where we saw the Amazon fire HD 10 tablet come in a few back you can also see it stacked up against a few other smartphones we’ve looked at in the recent past including the honor 8 and the Moto X 4 so it’s not going to be a super-fast performer but because you had this little screen here I don’t think it needs to be and again I was pretty pleased with the overall gaming performance we saw out of it so overall I am quite pleased with this little phone more so than I expected to be what surprised me the most was how all of the apps seemed to work fine
on here they shrink themselves down to this very small very low resolution display quite well so nothing’s getting cut off on it you can get access to all of the features that the app provides without any real compromises here beyond just the tiny screen and some of the text input difficulties that I mentioned a bit earlier but generally it is quite usable especially as a supplement to your daily driver phone so again if you’re going out hiking or some place where you’re concerned about bringing your $1,200 smartphone you can bring this little rugged device that might be a little more waterproof than your phone might be in fact you can even run a strap here through the bottom and attach it to your backpack and you’ll be able to make calls on it but you’ll also be able to run all of your apps too and again that was the thing that really surprised me that you can actually get usable apps on something this small back about 20 years ago the trend was to try to get these phones smaller and smaller that little Vader phone was probably the smallest phone that you could get at the time or at least competitive with the smallest phones out there and then as the smartphones came out they got bigger and bigger again so I went from that little Vader phone to a palm treo and it was a much larger phone but I liked having the functionality of the tray oh and now it looks like you might be able to get some decent functionality in a very tiny little device so good stuff all around decent competi compatibility with many carriers so again if you’re looking for a supplementary phone this might be a fun little supplement to have until next time this is LAN Simon thanks for watching this channel is brought to you by the LAN TV supporters including gold level supporters Chris Allegretto the four guys with quarters podcast Tom Albrecht a new zhaveri in Cali an Kumar if you want to help the channel you can by contributing as little as a dollar a month head over to LAN TV slash support to learn more and don’t forget to subscribe
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