Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Amazon’s Fire Phone was, by any reasonable metric, a colossal failure. Amazon took a $170 million write down on unsold inventory and contracts with its suppliers, and the phone’s $649 starting price tumbled below $200 in just four months. The Fire Phone's reputation was mostly deserved—Amazon’s fork of Android cut it off from the Google Play ecosystem, and its hardware was built around a couple of gimmicks that didn’t actually address actual needs. Talk of a follow-up phone persisted for a while, but no phone ever surfaced. Until now.

Kind of.

Amazon is getting back into smartphones, but instead of dumping money into R&D and maintaining its own forked OS and ecosystem, the company is taking a page from its e-readers by slapping ads and preinstalled apps onto existing budget-friendly phones. In exchange, buyers get a $50 discount on a handful of already-inexpensive phones, assuming they’re already paying $99/year for an Amazon Prime subscription (one could conceivably skirt this requirement by signing up for a Prime trial and then canceling).

Amazon still gets most of the benefits it would have gotten from Fire Phone buyers—a bunch of miniature billboards and a collection of preinstalled apps that point customers to other Amazon apps and services—but it doesn’t have to do as much work to get those results.

One of the “Prime Exclusive” models on offer is the Moto G4, which sell for $150 or $180 depending on the configuration. More interesting to bargain hunters, though, is the BLU R1 HD, a phone you can get for $50 with 8GB of storage and 1GB of RAM or $60 with 16GB of storage and 2GB of RAM.

BLU (which is short for “Bold Like Us,” so let’s just stick to BLU) has been in the low-end smartphone market for a while now, but just as the original Moto G redefined what you should expect for less than $200 back in 2013, the R1 HD is redefining what you should expect to get for less than $100. It’s not a great phone, but it’s a lot of phone for the money.

A nice-looking $60 phone

Specs at a glance: BLU R1 HD Screen 1280×720 5.0-inch IPS (294 PPI) OS Android 6.0 CPU MediaTek MT6735 (4x 1.3GHz Cortex A53) RAM 1GB or 2GB GPU ARM Mali T720 Storage 8GB or 16GB NAND flash, expandable via microSD Networking 2.4GHz 802.11n, Bluetooth 4.0. 2G: 850/900/1800/1900

3G: 850/1700/1900/2100

4G LTE: 2/4/7/17

Band 12 will be supported in a future OTA update. Ports Micro-USB, headphones Camera 8MP rear camera, 5MP front camera with LED flash Size 5.65" x 2.83" x 0.34" (143.5 x 72 x 8.7mm) Weight 5.05oz (143g) Battery 2,500 mAh Starting price $100 for 1GB/8GB, $110 for 2GB/16GB. Drops to $50/60 respectively with Amazon Prime Special Offers.

The R1 HD is a basic, no-frills phone. It’s a black-and-grey rectangle with rounded edges, a glass front, and plastic sides. Pry off its rubberized plastic back to reveal its microSD card slot and dual SIM trays. The latter feature is usually removed from the US versions of phones, but it’s present and apparently fully functional here. The SIM trays and SD card slot apparently don’t support hot-plugging, so if you put in a new SIM or card, the phone won't see them until you reboot it. And though you could probably take the phone apart and replace the battery if you were determined to do it, it’s not designed to be easily removed or replaced.

There’s a headphone jack on the top of the phone, micro USB port (not Type-C, which has yet to migrate to most mid- and low-end Android phones) on the bottom, and a volume rocker and power button on the right side. No surprises here.

The front and back of the phone are curved just enough to make the R1 relatively easy to hold in one hand (a 5-inch phone is what passes for “small” among Android phones these days). A small camera bump on the back makes the phone a little wobbly if you’re trying to use it while it’s sitting on a table or desk, but the R1 is large enough that wobbliness is not a huge problem. A single rear-facing speaker on the back of the phone kicks out tinny, sort-of-distorted sound at a respectable volume.

Fit and finish is generally excellent. The plastic doesn’t creak or flex, and the volume rocker and power button aren’t loose or jiggly. The phone is light enough to be comfortable but has the reassuring heft of a well-made piece of consumer technology. Even if you pay the full, unsubsidized $110 asking price, you get a phone that has no business looking or feeling as good as it does.

The color, contrast, and viewing angles of the R1’s bright 720p LCD display are all pleasant surprises. I had no problem with the responsiveness of the touchscreen, though, as is often the case with cheaper phones, the digitizer is faintly visible. In bright light, visible digitizers can give the impression that the screen has small dots or lines all over it in.

Many Android phones have fingerprint readers or waterproofing or some other extra features that I’d have talk about at this point, but the R1 HD can’t afford them. This is the baseline smartphone experience, albeit not a bad one. Its one added frill is a small front-facing LED flash for the front camera, which helps the grainy 5MP camera take selfies in dark rooms.

Not without its problems

As decent as the R1 HD is in most respects, you’re definitely going to notice that it’s not as good as a $600 or even $200 phone. Its 8MP camera takes grainy, washed-out pictures compared to the Moto G4 or G4 Plus (to say nothing of the $400 iPhone SE). Eight megapixels might be an improvement for someone coming from a flip phone (those people do exist, though there are fewer of them all the time). But most other smartphones do a better job.

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

There are subtler problems, too. Location tracking via GPS, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth is inconsistent, something that Pokémon Go is pretty good at testing. If you’re, say, driving and your location changes are big and obvious, the R1 HD will do a decent enough job of tracking you. If you’re walking, the phone frequently gets confused and starts alternately jumping around or standing still, even if you’re maintaining a steady pace.

Sometimes, you just run into Mystery Problems that don’t make sense. Turning the R1’s volume down seems to disable haptic feedback for typing and unlocking the phone. Whether this is supposed to be a bug or a feature isn’t clear—the phone’s “sound & notification” screen in the Settings app is one of the few areas where BLU deviates from Google’s Android.

And finally, the R1 HD’s wireless capabilities are no great shakes. Wireless only works on AT&T’s or T-Mobile’s networks (sorry, Verizon and Sprint people). The R1 only supports 2.4GHz 802.11n Wi-Fi instead of 5GHz 802.11n like the Moto G4 or 802.11ac like pretty much every phone at or above $300. The R1’s also missing NFC, so there’s no Android Beam or mobile payments support. Considering the price, all of the phone’s shortcomings are things you can live without. But they’re still shortcomings.

Listing image by Andrew Cunningham