BLU R1 Plus Review. Last year BLU made a splash low end budget with the release of R1 HD smartphone. But the phone that we have right now is the latest member to join the R1 family. It's called the R1 Plus.
BLU R1 Plus offers o ton of competitive features for a relatively low off contract price. It's about $160. However BLU is offering 24-hour sale that will knock off $50 from the price.
Body
The R1 Plus has aluminum metal housing that feels cool to touch and premium. The back is removable providing access to dual sim cards and MicroSD card slot for expandable storage. Unfortunately though you cannot remove the battery.
The power sleep on/off button is a bit small for our liking but it does have some texture to it to help you fingers locate. I you are coming from R1 HD this device considerably more chunky in the hands but that is because of the massive 4000 mAh battery that is hiding under the hood. One of the main reasons why you should buy this BLU R1 Plus is for that massive battery.
Display
Up front is 5.5' HD display that has pretty decent viewing angle and brightness. It's far form being the sharpest display we have ever seen. But that is what you can expect given the overall price less the $200.
No finger print
The is no finger print scanner found on this device so if that's a deal breaker for you, we would like to recommend something like $130 BLU Light Max.
Software
The software is Android 6.0 Marshmallow however we have been told Android 7.0 is in works and actually will be release very soon.
We do consider ourselves a fan of the skin found running on top of Marshmallow because how similar it is to stock Android. The is alot of Amazon bloatware and instead of Chrome on the home screen, Opera browser is there by default. Of course you can change the look of the launcher.
In terms of performance R1 Plus is not a speed beast but no slouch it does pay considerably longer to load content than a mid tier or flagship smartphone. But it does so without any sort of hiccups. You may wait few seconds longer for apps to load up content will show up fairly smoothly.
R1 Plus features a Mediatek 6737 Quad-core processor with 3GB of RAM and 32Gb of storage. We would reccommend this figuration over the model with 16GB storage and 2GB of RAM.
Camera
R1 Plus hase 13MP camera sensor on the rear with 5MP selfie camera. You can take some good images with the rear-facing sensor but the vast majority of images I captured were either exposed or slightly under exposed.
You can get it for $159 here: http://amzn.to/2DBIzz3
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