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by makomk 3542 days ago
Why would you imagine that Blu is worse? Especially on the low end, a lot of the older brands can and do trade heavily on their established name and reputation to sell utter crap. There's little downside to this - as you demonstrated, if someone buys their stuff and it turns out to be a piece of shit they'll often just assume that everything else must be even worse.

From the specs I can find, the R1 HD has a 5-inch 720p IPS display and much better reviews than the Sony Xperia E1 did. Not only that, at the time of its release the E1 was competing with the Moto E which (like its bigger brother) also had an IPS screen and far better reviews than the E1.

1 comments

I agree with this. I bought a Blu R1-HD when my iPhone 6 screen cracked, and decided to wait a few weeks so I could just replace it with an iPhone 7.

The few weeks using the Blu went a lot differently than I expected. The phone is very solid and the overall experience of using the phone is first-rate.

It would be one thing if we were talking about a $599 Android phone compared with a $749 iPhone. But this thing cost me $59 which is in a totally different ballpark. I would simply not have expected it to be anywhere close to iPhone quality but it is.

The only things that are "worse" than an iPhone 6 in my opinion are:

- the touch screen is slightly less accurate for taps, but this could also be because I'm less accustomed to Android.

- No compass. GPS works fine but panning the phone around doesn't re-orient the map when navigating which is a feature I like.

There are also several nice features which it has that the iPhones lack, such as support for SD card storage expansion (I immediately added a fast 64GB one I had lying around) and a second SIM card.

Not trying to nitpick features. Buying a R1-HD is like getting a one year old Ferrari for $12K.

You two have convinced me to buy an R1-HD.