[Device Reviews and Information] t3chfan:
Hi All,

I've picked up a bit of a bargain phone called a Cubot Manito. It cost me £72 from Gearbest which seems to be the cheapest price for a 3GB phone around, however please feel free to do some research to find your favoured vendor.

Please see below for a little review of the phone.

Basic tech specs

Main Features:

Display: 5.0 inch HD screen

CPU: MTK6737 Quad Core 1.3GHz

System: Android 6.0

RAM + ROM: 3GB RAM + 16GB ROM

Camera: Back camera 8.0MP ( SW 13.0MP ) + front camera 1.3MP ( SW 5.0 MP)

Bluetooth: 4.0

Navigation: GPS, A-GPS

Sensor: G-sensor, Proximity sensor, Accelerometer, Light sensor

SIM Card: Dual SIM dual standby, one is micro SIM card, the other is nano SIM card

Network:

2G: GSM 850/900/1800/1900MHz

3G: WCDMA 850/900/2100MHz

4G: FDD-LTE 800/1800/2100/2600MHz

The Manito comes with a screen protector already applied and a case in the box which is great as I'm sure you'd need to go online to buy these - not likely to be in your local phone store.

The Manito comes with a 5 inch screen on a standard resolution of 1280×720 pixels (or 720P) which gives us a PPI (pixels per inch) of 294 - more than good enough.

In terms of display performance the colours looked good, whites were nice and white but the blacks were a little more like a dark charcoal. The phone has the 'Miravision' display tweaking option built in and I found that setting this to 'Vivid' gave the best results.

The build quality of the Cubot Manito was much better than I'd expect from a phone costing as little as this. It feels very solid and well put together, with the metal frame giving a bit of reassurance and a slightly more premium feel than the all-plastic devices that you generally get at this price range.

The back of the phone has a removable plastic cover, this is slightly soft touch and has a diamond pattern in it which I wasn't overly keen on but it did improve grip.

3gb of RAM is a great feature at this end of the pricing spectrum and this really helps the performance of the Manito. Although it only has a 1.3Ghz Quad Core CPU I didn't have any trouble with games like Temple Run or Hot Wheels, but I don't expect that it would cope too well with more hardcore 3D games.

In everyday use I didn't really notice any problems with the performance of the phone, though initial set up took forever when I was installing about 30 apps at once.

Cubot haven't played too much with Android, and this looks and feels like a pretty stock version of Android 6.0 Marshmallow, which most users will be more than happy with.

The camera performance of the Manito wasn't amazing, but again we need to bear price tag in mind. I have had phones that cost more with worse cameras. Photos taken outdoors in daylight came out quite well, but quality suffered as light levels dropped.

Video quality wasn't very good at all but that's to be expected.

GPS and Bluetooth both worked fine, I had this set up with my car using Android Auto and didn't experience any problems.

The biggest issue I had with the Cubot Manito was the battery - it's only rated at 2350mAh which is very small for a current phone. I found that if I left for work with a fully charged phone I would struggle to make it to about 10pm, so you may want to top up the battery during the day. Not a big issue as I'm sure most of us are used to doing this but as we're now seeing phones with 3000mAh being commonplace this seemed like a bit of a compromise.

Overall though I cannot complain about any aspect of this phone at this price. It seems an absolute bargain and does everything that most users would need at a fraction of the price of mainstream phones.