Blu Vivo 6 review: Affordable Android in a pretty shell
Phone-maker Blu started making a name for itself in the States for being an affordable Android brand, but it’s taken some time for the company to bring its wares to the UK.
In fact, the Vivo 6 is the company’s first Blighty-bound device. Having launched in time for a crazy opening-day Amazon discount during Black Friday weekend in 2016, the phone is now back to its full price of £239. So is it worth the cash?
Blu Vivo 6 review: Design
- 154.3 x 74.9 x 7mm; 170g
- Metal body with polished chamfered edges
It’s hard for manufacturers these days to come up with a handset design that’s unique or even interesting. Although the Blu Vivo 6 is far from groundbreaking, it’s good enough.
It’s Huawei-esque in a sense, with its metal rear casing and parallel antenna bands running along the top and bottom. Both the front and back feature an attractive, slim and polished chamfered edge, which gives it that classy shine.
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The camera protrusion is circular and placed near the top to the centre, with a simple LED flash next to it. Although the back of the phone is ever so slightly rounded, it’s not enough to make it feel particularly comfortable in hand. Combined with the flat edges, the almost flat back makes the phone feel quite block-ish.
On the bottom edge, there’s a Type-C port for charging and transmitting data, flanked by two cutouts – one of which lets the sound escape from the single loudspeaker. The power and volume buttons live on the right edge, with the SIM tray on the opposite side, and the 3.5mm audio jack placed in the top edge. Despite being a sub-£250 phone, Blu has equipped the Vivo 6 with a fingerprint sensor for speedy sign-in, which lives inside a pill-shaped home button on the front of the device. It’s click-able, quite spongey in response and sits between the capacitive back and multi-tasking buttons below the screen.
On the whole, the design and build quality is great for such an affordable phone, but along with that spongey feeling home button, there are other questionable choices.
The SIM tray features two slots and, bizarrely, one of them is for a micro SIM, not nano SIM. The other is supposed to fit in a microSD card or a second SIM (this time nano), except, when a nano SIM is placed in the second slot, the SIM tray doesn’t fit back into the phone.
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Then there’s the 3.5mm jack which isn’t centred in between the top and bottom chamfered edges, instead, it overlaps the bottom polished chamfer, meaning part of it is angled away. It’s not unusual to see a non-flush headset jack, with phones becoming so slim, but it would look better if that was the case here.
Blu Vivo 6 review: Display
- 5.5-inch IPS display
- 1920 x 1080 resolution (401ppi)
On paper, the Full HD display on the front of Blu’s latest creation should be great, but it shows signs of being less than a flagship quality panel.
With a pixel density just over 400ppi, most of the content on screen is certainly sharp enough at arm’s length. Colours are nice to look at, but not especially vibrant.
Being an IPS panel means it’s not quite as lively or full of contrast like an AMOLED panel would be. But viewing angles are good, and being an in-touch display means there are fewer layers between the content displayed and the Corning Gorilla Glass 3 surface. That means you feel close to the action.
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On the negative side, there is often a yellow tint when the brightness is low. Whites appear warm, which is really unusual for an LCD panel (which tend to go to the cooler, blue side of the spectrum).
Still, for the most part, media consumption was pleasant enough, especially given the phone’s price point. That’s where it wins.
Blu Vivo 6 review: Software
- Android 6.0 Marshmallow
- Custom software/apps on top
The Blu Vivo 6 runs Google’s Android 6.0 operating system with the company’s own custom skin on top.
Like so many third-party versions of Android, the Blu has no app drawer. All of your apps are auto-organised to fill as many home screens as necessary, leaving you with the unenviable task of organising them all into folders. If there’s ever a reason needed not to restore a phone from a previous Android backup, it’s precisely this. Like with Apple’s iOS, you press-and-hold an app icon then tap the “x” to delete it from the phone. Making folders is achieved by tapping, holding and dragging an app icon on to another one.
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One element of Blu’s software we like a lot is the Edge Bar. It’s essentially a quick access panel and you can choose which apps you want to appear there. Kind of like Samsung’s software in its curved edge phones, despite the Blu being a flat panel.
A quick swipe across the home button brings the menu up and allows you quickly get to those apps that you really don’t want to have to hunt for. There’s enough space for six apps. It’s feels invaluable when you can’t remember where you put Shazam and absolutely have to tag a song to find out what it’s called. Or it is for us, anyway.
However, there’s plenty of bloatware installed on the Blu Vivo 6. Not all of it is redundant though. There’s an interesting app called Chameleon that allows you choose two colours from a scene and then cretes a live wallpaper to match. For those who care that their gadgets match their outfit, you could point the app to your coat and fingernails, or hoody and jeans, and the wallpaper and theme will go with what you’re wearing.
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Despite the added bloatware and no app drawer in Blu’s software skin, the overall Vivo 6 experience is clean and doesn’t negatively impact overall performance.
BLU Vivo 6 review: Performance
- Mediatek Helio P10 processor
- 4GB RAM; 64GB storage (microSD expandable)
As specifications go, the Blu Vivo 6 has the numbers to match the best of them. There’s 64GB of storage under the hood, sitting alongside 4GB of RAM. Rather than have a flagship Qualcomm Snapdragon chip, however, the company opted for MediaTek’s Helio P10 processor which, while powerful, isn’t quite on par with the high-end Snapdragon chipsets.
Still, day-to-day performance is good enough that you won’t be hankering too much for a more expensive phone. Although there was minor stuttering and frame-rate dropping in some mobile games during our testing period, it wasn’t anything different to what we experience with many (often more expensive) handsets. For the most part, regular transitions and animations like app switching, scrolling through lists and opening app folders were smooth.
Blu Vivo 6 review: Battery Life
- 3,130mAh battery
- No fast charging
The Vivo 6’s battery is capacious enough to get you through a work day, no matter how busy you are. In our testing we got to late evening/bed time without it reaching the dreaded 15 per cent level. It did get close on particularly active days, though, so it’s nowhere near being a two day battery.
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With its 10W supposedly “rapid” charger included, the phone doesn’t top-up anywhere near as quickly as Qualcomm’s Quick Charge 3.0 would. We expect faster charging times, but getting from dead to full in less than two hours isn’t the worst that we’ve ever seen.
Similar to other Android phones, the Blu Vivo 6 comes with some enhanced battery optimisation. That means it kills apps running in the background if they’re using too much juice. That can mean some annoyances if you have apps like Strava which need to run in the background in order to track your runs or bike rides. Thankfully, you can manually whitelist apps to be non-optimised.
Blu Vivo 6 review: Camera
- 13-megapixel Sony sensor
- f/2.0 aperture
- 1080p video
The 13-megapixel camera built into the Vivo 6 has a plethora of features to keep any snapper avidly occupied. As well as the regular automatic mode it has HDR (high dynamic range), night, panorama, time-lapse, slow-motion, smart scene, text recognition and macro modes (among others).
While shooting you can add guidelines, change the picture size, capture mode and add filters, as you can with most camera phones. Sadly, the results left us a little disappointed.
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In automatic mode, even with lots of available light, the images came out looking noisy and lacking in detail. The only time images looked close to good was outdoors in daylight – and even those weren’t fantastic.
As you’d expect, the lower the light levels are, the worse results get. Not even the professional mode that gives you more manual control could save the quality of the photos.
Interestingly, the night mode shots we captured came out pretty well, especially considering how unimpressive the regular automatic shots turned out. Still, there are many better cameras out there, even at this price point.
Verdict
For its price point, the Blu Vivo 6 boasts a handful of great features and an impressive specification. It’s pleasant to use but does have its flaws.
The camera is disappointing, even for a mid-range device. Despite its many shooting modes, just taking a plain old photo almost always results in excessive image noise and limited sharpness.
The phone’s display is fine, while build quality and design are certainly more premium than the Moto G4 (and not too far off the quality offered by the more expensive OnePlus 3T).
Blu’s main competition at this price point is the Honor 5X (and possibly Honor 8). Which you go for depends on whether you’d rather have clean software or a better camera. Blu’s phone may have no app drawer, but it has fewer annoyances than Huawei’s EMUI software.
Blu Vivo 6: Alternatives to consider
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Moto G4
- From £169
While not as small as its predecessors, the fourth-gen Moto G continued the trend of offering a lot of performance for your money. There are still very few devices that offer as complete an Android experience as the Moto G for under £200. It’s stock Android, has a big screen, and will cost you less than the Blu Vivo 6… but it has considerably less storage and RAM.
Honor 5X
- £190
Like the Blu, the Honor 5X has a 5.5-inch Full HD resolution screen and comes in a similar glass and metal package. It doesn’t have as much storage or RAM as the Blu, but it’s £40 cheaper and offers a great experience for that price.
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Vodafone Smart Platinum 7
- £300
For those wanting a more powerful device, the Smart Platinum 7 has a higher-resolution AMOLED screen which looks fantastic, alongside a pair of front-facing speakers to make your media that much more immersive. It costs more, but it’s worth it in our opinion.
Samsung Gear wearables can now be used with iOS devices
Samsung and Apple have never always seen eye to eye as we’ve seen all too often the two smartphone giants trying to outdo each other. But we’re pleased to say that Samsung has been the bigger man and announced its Gear series of wearables can now used with iOS devices. If you own any of those devices you can now download the Gear S or Gear Fit apps from Apple’s App Store, follow the onscreen instructions and use the two in harmony.
- Samsung Gear S3 Classic review Android Wear, beware, this is the smartwatch to beat
Samsung has said a wide range of features will be supported between the two platforms, including the usual array of notifications, Find My Gear function, syncing of health data and the ability to download apps directly to the Gear wearables.
Only the three Gear wearables mentioned are supported for now, and there’s no word on whether that selection will be increased in the future. You’ll also need to make sure you have a compatible iOS device to connect to a Gear watch. Compatible devices start at the iPhone 5 and include every generation up to the latest iPhone 7 models and the iPhone SE, they’ll need to be running iOS 9.0 or later.
Younghee Lee, EVP of global marketing, mobile communications at Samsung said: “By offering Android and iOS compatibility with our latest Gear devices, we’re giving users more ways to optimise their wearable experiences and connect to Samsung’s Galaxy of possibilities”.
The Gear S and Gear Fit apps are available to download from the Apple App Store now.
Amazon wins first Golden Globe film award for ‘Manchester’
Casey Affleck won a best-actor Golden Globe for his performance in Manchester by the Sea, marking the first time Amazon Studios has received a major film category award. It picked up rights to the film, directed by Kenneth Lognergan and produced by Matt Damon, last year at Sundance for $10 million. Amazon has a pretty good chance of snagging an Oscar next month too, as Affleck is the front-runner for best actor in that competition
Billy Bob Thorton also scored Amazon Video a Globe, winning best actor in a TV series as Billy Mcbride in the legal drama Goliath. As proof the company has arrived in Hollywood, host Jimmy Fallon pointed out Jeff Bezos in the audience during the broadcast and noted, “he actually arrived yesterday, but there was no one around to sign for him.”
Streaming arch-rival Netflix also snagged two Golden Globes, winning twice on The Crown for best drama series and best actress (Clair Foy). That makes four total snagged by Netflix (it won in 2014 and 2015 for House of Cards) next to six for Amazon, which won two for Transparent in 2015, two in 2016 for Mozard in the Jungle and two this year.
Amazon is just the distributor for Manchester by the Sea (along with Roadshow Pictures), and not responsible for production. So far, no Amazon Original films have won any major prizes, though it only started producing them in 2015 with Spike Lee’s Chi-Raq. The retail giant was savvy enough to attach its name to Manchester, and planned a theatrical release and awards campaign from the get-go. If the film does pick up on Oscar, it’ll not only garner Amazon a ton of publicity, but the first look at streaming what would be an Oscar-gilded project.
Source: THR
MIT’s 3D graphene is ten times stronger than steel
An awful lot of ink has been spilled about how graphene is going to basically save the world with its myriad applications and powers. But chances to actually see evidence of how and why the hexagonal lattices are so strong in a life-size way have been few and far between. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has changed that. The school’s latest experiment uses graphene material that’s 5 percent as dense as steel and ten times the metal’s strength, showing what’s possible when the composite is more than just a flat sheet.
Starting from a highly-accurate computer model, the researchers 3D printed diatomic cubes to represent the material’s sponge-like structure and then subjected them to compression tests. The shape here is incredibly important; the cube itself looks like a magenta sponge. Its porous nature means that there’s more surface area, and more surface area means higher strengths at lower weights.
Perhaps most interesting is that the different cubes reacted unexpectedly. One with thicker walls and folds, for example, was actually less stable as more pressure was applied. Compared to one with thinner construction, it shattered explosively. By comparison, the thinner cube broke down in an almost controlled way, retaining its shape almost to the end.
MIT says that this is because the thinner walls allow the structure to deform gradually while the thicker one stores the deformation energy, which releases all at once. This lead to the discovery that it it’s not so much the materials in use (although it certainly helps), but their shape that contributes to strength, too.
“You can replace the material itself with anything,” MIT’s head of Civil and Environmental Engineering said. “The geometry is the dominant factor.”
One potential use? Taking polymer or metal particles, coating them with graphene and then removing the base materials after heat and pressure treatment. Such a method would leave the graphene’s lightweight and super strong structure in place. MIT thinks this type of application could be used anywhere from concrete bridges and even filtration systems for water or chemical processing.
Source: MIT
Google’s Waymo Unveils Fleet of Self-Driving Chrysler Pacifica Minivans
Google spin-off Waymo unveiled its fleet of 100 self-driving Chrysler Pacifica minivans in a preview event ahead of the North American International Auto Show on Sunday (via USA Today).
John Krafcik, CEO of Waymo, told attendees at the Detroit event that the fleet packs an array of new sensors that were all developed in-house, including an enhanced vision system, improved radar and laser-based lidar.
“We’re serious about creating fully self-driving cars that can help millions of people, and to do that we have to oversee both the self-driving software and the self-driving hardware,” said Krafcik.
The autonomous vehicles are the result of a partnership between Google and Fiat Chrysler that was agreed last spring, and represent the first time Google has chosen to build self-driving technology itself, rather than turn to third-party manufacturers. As a result, Waymo said the company had been able to cut costs by 90 percent.
But apart from cutting costs, Krafcik told attendees that building the hardware in-house had allowed the company to develop better technology, such as an improved rooftop radar system, or Lidar, that allows the cars to read more information off the environment.
“The detail we capture is so high that not only can we detect pedestrians all around us, but we can tell which direction they’re facing,” said Krafcik. “This is incredibly important, as it helps us more accurately predict where someone will walk next.”
The hybrid vehicles will join the company’s Lexus SUVs and Firefly vehicles on public roads in California and Arizona later this month to speed up testing. Waymo has yet to reveal when the self-driving system employed in the minivans will be ready to install in production vehicles, but the companies are thought to be planning an autonomous ride-sharing service to compete with the likes of Uber and Lyft.
Apple’s self-driving technology plans remain tightly under wraps, but Cupertino is thought to be developing its own autonomous driving system for use in third-party vehicles. The company is said to have given its car team until 2017 to prove the feasibility of a self-driving vehicle system.
Apple revealed its interest in the emerging self-driving market in November 2016 when it sent a letter to the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, suggesting that new entrants to the auto industry should get the same rights as established companies.
Tags: Google, Waymo
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Airmail for iOS Gains Workflow and Bear App Integrations With 1.5 Update
Popular cross-platform email client Airmail received an update to its iOS component today, bringing a couple of notable extra features to the app.
New with version 1.5 is support for third-party automation tool Workflow, enabling users to incorporate email and inbox actions into their custom Workflow creations.
The update also brings integration with cross-platform note-taking app Bear, allowing users to create a note in the writing app that containing a shortcut to a mail in Airmail, for example.
In addition to fixing some minor bugs, a handful of new Custom Actions have been included too, along with an OpenURL action, a new Default Inbox, and support for Gmail authentication.
Airmail 1.5 costs $4.99 and is available for iPhone and iPad on the App Store. [Direct Link]
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Apple Executives to Visit India to Discuss Local Manufacturing Plans
Apple executives will attend a high-profile meeting with Indian officials later this month in order to discuss the company’s plans to set up a manufacturing plant in the country.
Apple is said to be seeking a number of tax and other incentives at the meeting, set to take place on January 25, and could potentially ask for long-term duty exemptions. According to PTI, Indian representatives from a number of government departments will attend, including officials from commerce, industrial policy and promotion (DIPP), revenue, environment and forest, electronics, and IT.
Last month it emerged that Apple was in talks with India to explore the possibility of making products locally, as well as set up a distribution center, after Prime Minister Narendra Modi ordered his government to exempt foreign retailers for three years from a requirement to locally source 30 percent of goods solid in their stores.
Apple sent a letter to India’s federal government in December, outlining its manufacturing plans and asking for financial incentives, and this month’s meeting would appear to be the next step in the negotiations.
In September 2015, Apple CEO Tim Cook sat down with Prime Minister Modi to discuss various matters and Cook reportedly responded positively to Modi’s invitation to open a manufacturing base in India. Foxconn was previously reported to be looking at the possibility of an expansion into India to produce iPhones and iPads, but Cook’s outspoken interest in the possibility was Apple’s first public interest in the expansion.
Apple products are currently manufactured in six countries, including China, Korea, Japan, and the United States.
Tag: India
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Uvify Draco Release Date, Price and Specs – CNET
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UVify is showing off its new racing drone this week at the CES trade show in Las Vegas. The Draco modular drone is easy to repair, lightweight and lightning-fast. UVify claims it can reach a top speed of 100 miles per hour.
The drone features a protective carbon-fiber shell. If it does get damaged, the modular design allows you to quickly swap out the propellers and appendages. The Draco, which UVify is advertising as ready-to-fly out of the box, is also capable of performing 360-degree flips and other stunts, which can be captured on the built-in camera.
The Draco racing drone is available now for preorder for $500 (coverted to roughly £407 or AU$685). A second model with a high definition camera (an upgrade from analog) can be had for $600.
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