Cubot is a brand known for its rugged and budget phones but most especially its budget/cheap phones. The brand has yet again dropped another budget phone called the Cubot A1. The Cubot A1 is a nice-looking phone with decent specs and features but it doesn’t have much to offer.
Although it’s a nice option for anyone looking for a very cheap android phone(not a recommendation).
Cubot A1 Key Details
The Cubot A1 has a thickness of 10.4mm which is unusually bulky for a phone with a moderate 5000mAh battery.
To put this into perspective, the Redmi Note 12 also has a 5000mAh battery but has a thickness of just 8mm and the Redmi 9T that has a bigger 6000mAh battery is 9.6mm thick. The biggest contributing factor to a phone’s thickness is its battery.
Decent camera specs
Additionally, it weighs 205g, at the back of the phone is a camera module that has a square shape and curved edges that houses dual camera lenses and a 0.5A LED flash.
The rear camera consists of a 13MP primary sensor with auto-focus and a 0.3MP auxiliary sensor. The phone also feature an 8MP front-facing camera. It’ll be naïve to expect much from the image and video quality produced from the phone’s camera.
While the camera cannot produce professional looking images, it should be capable to produce images with quality suitable for social media. The rear main camera is capable of recording up to 1080p videos by the way.
Display is okay
Further, it has a teardrop HD+ display with slightly thick bezels except for the bottom bezel that appear to be thicker, this is a norm for budget phones. The display measures 6.56-inches and it has a resolution of 720 x 1612 pixels.
Battery and charging are moderate
As stated earlier, the Cubot A1 is equipped with a reasonably large 5000mAh battery but unfortunately, it supports just 10W charging.
From experience, it’ll take over 2 hours to fully charge the device, well at least the battery could easily last a day on a single charge and a 10W charger is included in the box.
Not a gaming device
Under the hood is a 6-year old Unisoc SC9863A 28nm octa-core processor paired with 4 GB RAM and 128 GB onboard storage.
It supports up to 4 GB virtual RAM expansion and the internal storage can be expanded up to 1 TB via MicroSD.
This implies that the Cubot A1 is not meant for intense use, the 6-year old low-end processor in this device cannot handle most of the tasks that even the low-end mobile chips today can handle.
Running on Stock Android
Running the phone is the Android 13 OS and it’s the stock version, Cubot does not have an official custom UI like many phone brands today.
Don’t get it wrong, this is actually a good thing, phones with vanilla or stock Android usually have less bugs compared to phones with custom skins. Phones with custom skins are usually riddled with bugs and anytime they receive an update they end up with more crazy issues. Of course I’m referring to you Xiaomi.
Additional Features
Additional featuires of the Cubot A1 includes Face unlock, Bluetooth 4.2, Wi-Fi, GPS and other essential navigation systems, OTG, Proximity, etc.
Funny enough, the phone lacks a fingerprint sensor. This is inexcusable because even cheaper devices are equipped with fingerprint scanners, it’s essential for a phone to have a fingerprint sensor because it’s more secure than other security features including Face ID.
Finally, the Cubot A1 is available in Black, Blue and Green colorways and it retails for about $150.
Final thoughts
The Cubot A1 is a nice phone with decent specs, a sleek design and of course it’s very cheap but its lack of a fingerprint sensor and the old processor that powers the phone are factors that must be taken into account because it means that the Cubot A1 is a device you definitely do not want to store important details on and it’s not meant for intense use.
This means that the Cubot A1 is a device suitable for kids or for anyone that needs a cheap device for unimportant stuff.
Source; Cubot