The CUBOT H1 Smartphone Test: A Month with 3-4 Days of Battery per Charge

The Feel

The device fits in my hand comfortably, although not easily to use one handed as I mentioned above. I've been using it in the silicone case, and I have no issues with that - it gives the edges a curve meaning I'm not subject to something sharper such as the Galaxy S6 Edge or One M9. Actually more often than not I'm playing with the case when bored, flicking it off at the edge and reattaching it, in some weird sense of being therapeutic. People who are used to small or light phones are going to notice a difference here as it certainly isn't either of those, but neither are excessive. There's a reason the 7 inch P8 max smartphone sells well in China, for example.

Audio quality is satisfactory on the H1 - my use case for this as of late has involved taking it into the bathroom and leaving it on the side playing music while I shower. This way if I know how long the track is, I can ensure I don't spend too in there if I'm in a hurry. I place the single speaker facing a wall to act as an odd form of amplification, and it only needs to be at around 90% volume to be over the sound of the water. That being said, there is a jump up in the last 5%, causing some minor distortion. As anecdotal as that seems, if you're playing something to a group of people in a noisy environment, it is worth noting. I've mainly been playing melodic or 8-bit speed metal and the clarity at reasonable volume levels are not degraded by a fast paced tune.

Phone call connection quality is also good, despite the fact that I live in an area that seems to have lead paint in the walls. Using it both for audio calls through the air or Skype video calls over Wi-Fi while on business trips came through without issue.

The Camera

On the camera side, of course we weren't expecting anything great and my own results confirm that. Based on my broken DSLR, I was left with the H1 as my photography device for the recent SuperComputing 15 conference. In the interests of taking pictures to as reference material it was good, as long as I was sitting in the first few rows. In the varied light of the show floor, bad light photos were pretty junk even after post processing in Windows but in light photographs were satisfactory for publication.

For home use, in natural light, the camera provided a much nicer response, giving shots suitable for family albums assuming the subject was still. Cue pictures of cats, food, the theatre and a bookshop (click through for full resolution):

Cat One: Summer

Home-made Marshmallows

London Coliseum, before The Nutcracker

Carturesti Carusel, A Bookshop in Bucharest, Romania

Cat Two: Cici

The camera software is the standard android app, and with the H1 it is noticeably slow when taking an image. Focusing is noticably longer than a high end device but if you need to capture one photo in an ongoing scene, it is best to hold down and take up to 40 continuous photographs and then delete most of them. The camera does come with a form of EIS which is great, but the stability range is limited, making a burst capture of at least 2 or 3 required to get the best shot. There are motion capture modes, as well as beautify and panorama also. With Lightroom now free for Android, at least basic photo editing can be done almost immediately.

For an image comparison, I took photographs of three scenes using the devices at my disposal (caution, large images). It is worth noting that the HTC One Max I have suffers from the purple effect, due to the image low-light amplifiers burning out on some early models.

A quick note on the rest of the software - despite the origins of the phone, mine came with an English based kernel / OS. I changed the default home screen to Google Now (because I'm using it a fair bit these days) and all of my usual software and games (Kairosoft, naturally) including Fallout Shelter seem to work and can be switched between easily using the long press on the home button. I have noticed in the past month two apps that seem to close without an error message - it happened once after a crop in Lightroom that involved rotation, and any time I want to start TrickShot. I'm not sure if this is a compatibility issue based on the OS, the platform or the chipset, but I was expecting the H1 to handle it properly.

The Video

At this point the 16GB storage on the device hasn't become a burden, perhaps due to the microSD. Pictures come out at ~2MB each and videos at just over 1MB a second using the fine detail settings (720p) saved in 3gp format. From what I have read, the video mode on the H1 gets a lot of criticism due to the low quality or the EIS being very basic. It's true it's not the best to capture long lasting memories on, because at distance there is not much detail and requires a good light source, but it's more of an add on than a focal point.

For video comparisons, the garden and night-time road scenes were used for motion and static video: