Audio, Display and Camera Quality

The 1080p panel comes from DJI, and it’s pretty good. There’s really nothing to complain about. It might not be as bright as panels in big-brand flagships, but it’s a very good display nonetheless.

Viewing angles and colour reproduction are good, brightness is not an issue in most situations. MediaTek’s Miravision technology can be used to fine tune the display.

The 2.5D curved design gives the phone a sleek look, although we are not entirely sure about the scratch resistance of the panel.

Audio quality is average. There is no noise cancelling microphone and the side firing speaker is not very powerful. Call quality is good, the earpiece is loud enough, but we’ve seen better.

So what about the camera? It’s based on Sony’s IMX214 sensor, probably the most popular imaging sensor on the planet. The camera sports an f/2.0 aperture, which is what we’ve come to expect from devices in this price segment.

With that in mind, we were hoping for some good results, but the Xtouch was a disappointment. We suspect the optics aren’t as good as Bluboo would have us believe, so practically all images lack sharpness.

We also noticed some light bleed and ghosting in certain situations, probably owing to the design of the camera cover.

Outdoor shots were a mixed bag. The camera struggles with sharp details and the HDR mode is sluggish. It helps, but it also results in a fair amount of ghosting, and it degrades the details even more.

Indoor daylight shots were average at best. It’s obvious that the optics just can’t keep up with the sensor. We’ve tested loads of IMX214 phones in the same setting and practically all of them delivered superior results.

Night shots under incandescent lighting were more of the same: loads of soft edges and blurred details.

We’ve come across camera glitches on a lot of phones, but in most cases they were software related (and sometimes they were addressed with OTA updated). However, we are dealing with a hardware issue here. Bad optics can’t be fixed with a simple software update.

The front facing camera is based on a 5-megapixel OmniVision sensor and it’s quite good. Of course, we’ve seen better on flagships, but this one is better than expected. It features autofocus and HDR. It's surprising that the front camera performs so well considering the issues we encountered with the rear snapper.

The MediaTek camera app is a departure from stock Android, but it’s still relatively close. There aren’t that many bells and whistles, apart from the pointless ability to interpolate the back and front camera to 16 and 8 megapixels respectively. The upside is that the camera app is very fast and responsive, which is not the case on many cheap devices. The viewfinder is just as fast as you’d expect on a big-brand device.

All in all, the Bluboo Xtouch doesn’t do well in the imaging department. The IMX214 sensor is getting old, but it’s still a good choice for budget devices and can deliver good results if it’s implemented properly (with quality optics). Unfortunately, the optics on the Xtouch simply fail to utilise the full potential of the Sony sensor.

The front facing camera is above average for this price segment, there’s nothing to complain about. We like the fact that it’s not a fixed focus unit, which is not something we usually see on cheap phones.