Oukitel C18 Pro
The famous rugged-phone manufacturer Oukitel, specializing in high cost-performance segments, is back with its latest affordable cutting-edge phone, the Oukitel C18 Pro. However, it’s not meant to be a rugged or flagship smartphone. It is targeted at the budget users, offering good specs at an affordable price tag.
Since the price tag is under $150 (even providing a discount price at $99 now), it deserves the word ‘Value For Money’ at first sight. Especially when touching the phone, its build quality and design definitely would make it stand out from those equally boring budget models.
Oukitel C18 Pro Review: Design & Appearance
It’s extremely hard to find a budget model like the Oukitel C18 Pro having the glass sandwich frame design with a 2.5D covering. The front design is the biggest surprise. The 6.55-inch OGS display fills the front without leaving an unpleasant chin. More importantly, this $100 model features the popular hole-punch selfie camera just like most 2020 flagships. And the area of the camera hole is well controlled.
I have to say that its design is really unique and looks way more premium than other devices with such a price tag. On the other hand, the resolution of 1600 x 720 pixels is a bit disappointing for a 2020 device. But considering the price and rest of the specs, the decision to go with a 720p display to achieve a balance between better perfromance and longer battery life is somehow reasonable.
The display isn’t really crisp but for a $100 phone, we are not complaining.
The rear design can be equally praised. The symmetrical design of four cameras and a fingerprint sensor is impressive as first seen in 2020. The industrial design including the sandwich structure and the 2.5D glass covering is usually reserved for the higher segment product.
Oukitel C18 Pro Review: Software & Dual-Sim Card support
Within this price segment, the hardware compromises were common due to cost reduction. Although the MTK Helio P25 processor with 4GB RAM and 64Gb ROM running inside the C18 Pro is not an attractive performance choice, users can have complete functions of Android 9 (e.g. Google Assistant, Apps and basic games installation, music, video, etc.) without obvious lags. Meanwhile, the Oukitel team informed us that the C18 Pro will be able to update to the Android 10 version in the near future, which is a comparative advantage against most budget phones. In addition to the primary SIM slot, the Oukitel C18 Pro provides one more card slot for an extended microSD or a second SIM card.
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Oukitel C18 Pro Review: Camera
Another attractive dimension is the camera combination including the modules of 16MP (primary), 8MP (wide-angle), 5MP (macro), and 2MP (portrait bokeh sensor). Compared to the useless multi-camera modules on same-priced phones or even more expensive opponents, the secondary cameras of the cost-effective C18 Pro are able to produce decent images. No more words – just check the samples below.
The samples shot by the C18 Pro far exceeded our expectations for a cheap device. After all, it doesn’t look like a sample from a $100 phone. Although colors on the primary camera might be over-saturated when turning on the auto-scene-mode, the images presented decent clarity and good range, not just for the primary camera but also those secondary cameras. And have to mention its macro camera, it is even better than some mid-rangers’ macro performance.
Oukitel C18 Pro Review: Battery
The battery equipped in the Oukitel C18 Pro reaches a big capacity of 4000mAh. In daily use, it was able to guarantee around 8-hour active display time. The phone supports plenty of language options to cover most consumers.
Conclusion
Oukitel has just updated our expectations from a real budget phone. Although the phone could not be praised for its performance and display resolution, some features like industrial design, build quality, cameras and battery, just made it outstanding from the boring budget crowds.
It also makes the competition of budget phones become more interesting as budget phones still are dominant models in a lot of developing countries. And that’s also the reason why we wanted to review the Oukitel C18 Pro.
You can learn more about the device from the official website here.
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