A review of the $10 Walmart phone—better than nothing, but not by much

We bought an LG Sunrise for the low, low price of $10. We regret it.

Read the whole story

 

[ethd]

I bought one of these and activated it on Straight Talk while my G3 was getting its screen repaired (a small hairline crack that made it impossible to actually use the screen, yay).

My impressions were similar: they cheaped out on a few things that would make the device almost unusable for me. The screen would have done better with nothing more than better viewing angles; the resolution and dithering were weird but not something I couldn't get used to, but the viewing angles are almost impossible to nail and the inversion of the colors gives me a headache.

By far, the biggest frustration was the 512MB of RAM. The Snapdragon 200 is a surprisingly solid performer, but when browsing Ars occasionally the entire page would have to reload while I was scrolling down because there wasn't enough RAM to display the whole thing at once.

The camera was actually way better than I was expecting. Under the right conditions, you can actually get a pretty good shot.

Battery life is awesome, at least in comparison to my G3, which only gets a few hours of screen on time. The Sunrise has a 1540ish mAh battery, which is small by today's standards, but since everything else is pretty low-powered spec-wise it all adds up to me never getting less than 6 hours SOT and being surprised by how much battery life I have at the end of the day.

That all said, I came from an LG G3 with a QHD screen without a single bad viewing angle, a Snapdragon 801, and 3GB RAM. My mother-in-law I gave it to, on the other hand, came from a Samsung Galaxy Centura, a phone that retailed at $100 from Straight Talk and had similar specs. Its battery life had gone down to about 1 hour of SOT despite having the same amount of RAM and storage, a significantly weaker processor, Android 4.0, and a smaller screen of the same resolution. My mother-in-law is utterly floored by how well this phone performs in comparison.

You just have to go in with the right expectations. If you're going for something that performs pretty well, you'll want to pay a bit more and get a 2nd-gen Moto E or a lot more and get something like the Moto G, OnePlus X or the LG G3. (Or even more and get something like the Galaxy S6, LG V10, Moto X, OnePlus One, Nexus 5X/6P, etc.) But if you're content with something that's "good enough," then the Sunrise should be fine. It's never going to be great, but it's fine, and that's all you can hope for when you have a price point this low.

EDIT: put some spacing between the lines so as to not create a wall of text.

 

[ethd]

RicheTheBuddha[/url]":2wxvds9w]The reviewer left out a a few very important aspects:

How well did the phone functionality work? Could a user hear calls on it OK? Could the person on the other end of the call hear OK? Was it around average or worse when it comes to dropped calls?

Did the texting function work OK or was the weak screen a hindrance in typing SMS messages?

How tough was the phone? Could it easily survive most drops onto a tile floor undamaged?

Finally, would most users be better off with this smartphone with a bad screen or should they go with a "dumb" call/text/camera phone with a clearer display?

And as for the camera on the Sunrise, while far from "great" I sure wouldn't call it "awful," at least in conditions with good lighting.

I actually used this phone for a few days, as I said above, so I can answer a few of these.

It's roughly average on dropped calls. The signal strength is as reliable as you get on most phones. Calls are fine, but a bit noisy on the other end. The earpiece's volume is pretty low even at maximum volume.

Texting is fine, but the stock LG keyboard was definitely built for phones with bigger screens. I'd recommend SwiftKey instead. Other than that, it's fine for texting and instant messaging once you adjust to the small screen.

I never dropped it, but I can't imagine it would do too bad. It's pretty chunky. The screen is plastic, which should hopefully be harder to shatter than glass, but I haven't tried it.

As far as being better off with this phone or with a dumbphone... It really depends on what you use a phone for. Any Web browsing or app usage is going to be a better experience on this than it is on even a higher end feature phone.

 

[ethd]

orangpelupa[/url]":13dy6ew5]Does it have GPS? If it does, then it also can be used as super cheap always connected GPS tracker.

For car, for luggage, etc.

Heck, even of it don't have GPS, it is also nice to be used for lots of other stuff. Making phone call, first smartphone for little kids, home automation, voice command for home entertainment, etc

It does, and it works well! I used it for some navigation around town and it worked as well as my G3 for that, albeit a bit slower (whether that had to do with AGPS working over 3G instead of LTE or RAM limitations, I dunno).

 

[ethd]

fivemack[/url]":1keesfv4]There's an obvious comparator for this phone: the iPhone 3G. The Sunrise is about the same size, the same screen resolution, and has a substantially better processor.

I would say more iPhone 3GS than 3G. Even then, this is quite a bit more powerful, though the screen is much, much worse despite having the same resolution.