Conclusion

Bluboo is a small company, specialising in high battery capacity budget phones, with some wearables on the side (the company recently announced its first Android Wear watch, which should ship early next year).

The Xtouch is Bluboo’s quasi-flagship, so it is supposed to look and feel a bit more upmarket than the rest of its line-up. It tries to give off a premium vibe, but quality control is clearly not as good as it should be. The sharp CNC machined edges could do with some polish, literally. The second problem is the camera – we’ve come to expect much better results from Sony’s IMX214 sensor and Bluboo clearly dropped the ball in the optics department.

The underlying hardware is rather good. The MT6753 is a capable chip, although some may argue that a Helio X10 would have be a better fit for a device with 3GB of RAM and 32GB of integrated storage.

On paper, the Xtouch looks like a good device for the money, and a couple of things make it stand out (802.11ac wireless, fingerprint scanner, 32GB of storage). Unfortunately, in real life, it fails to live up to expectations. Poor quality control and a subpar camera drag it down. We’d happily trade the excellent fingerprint scanner for a better camera and proper quality control.

The outfit clearly tried to bolster its brand with a competitively priced smartphone, with an eye catching design and a good spec sheet, but it simply cut too many corners along the way.

Bluboo Xtouch Pros and Cons

Pros:

• Reliable and fast fingerprint scanner
• 3GB of RAM and 32GB of fast eMMC 5.0 storage
• Can accommodate two SIMs and a microSD card at once

Cons:

• Build quality issues
• Worse than expected battery life
• Subpar camera optics