Blu G90 smartphone review – USA phone with triple camera
American newcomer. Blu Phones are now also available in Europe. Reason enough for us to take a closer look at the mid-range Blu G90 smartphone. Whether the mobile phone designed in Florida with a triple camera and narrow display bezels can convince us?
Blu G90:
processor: Mediatek Helio A25 8 x 1.8 GHz, Cortex-A53
graphic card: PowerVR GE8320
Main memory: 4096 MB
screen: 6.5 inch 20: 9, 1600 x 720 pixels 270 PPI, capacitive touchscreen, IPS, 60 Hz
Mass storage: 64 GB eMMC Flash, 64 GB, 55 GB available
Weight: 185 g, power supply: 53 g
price: 199 euros
Left: Blu home page
Note: The manufacturer can use different components such as monitors, drives and memory modules with similar specifications under the same model name.
Housing, equipment and operation – fast WLAN:
Smartphones for around 200 euros are a dime a dozen. With the Blu G90 there is now a new challenger from the USA, which will appear at the same time as Blu Products is entering the European market. Blu’s smartphones are designed in the USA, but are manufactured in China.
The smartphone is available in the four colors magenta, blue, black and white. Our white test device has a silver frame and is easy to hold thanks to its rounded corners. The weight is at the usual level, the back, which is slightly iridescent when exposed to light, looks high-quality, the smartphone is reasonably stable, but gives way to pressure in some places.
The phone has been around for a long time in the USA, and this is also noticeable on the smartphone: You can find faster memory or higher-resolution screens in individual comparison devices. Although the Blu G90 can still keep up overall, you have to be satisfied with older Bluetooth 4.1 and quite a few LTE frequencies. The LTE speed is also limited.
With WLAN, we achieved quite high transfer rates in the 5 GHz band for a smartphone with WiFi 4. The modem in the MediaTek Helio A25 theoretically also supports WiFi 5.
Android 10 is on board, but the security patches are a bit older. It remains to be seen how regularly Blu Phones will deliver updates.
There is a physical fingerprint sensor on the back of the smartphone. The smartphone can be reliably unlocked with a short delay. The general operation works well, but is delayed by the low performance of the SoC under high load.
Cameras – Not so flexible:
A modern pixel binning camera that increases the light sensitivity of the individual pixels does not yet exist in the Blu G90; instead, a normal 16-megapixel lens is used. It is supplemented by a wide-angle camera with 8 megapixels and a depth sensor that is supposed to improve the blurring effects in portraits.
The main camera generally takes a bit pale photos, but the details sometimes surprise with their good sharpness of detail. In low light, on the other hand, the performance of the camera is significantly weaker, here you can still see image content, but the image is very grainy in detail and the brightening is significantly limited. The wide-angle camera is OK for snapshots, but has problems with high contrasts.
Videos can be recorded in a maximum of 1080p and 30 fps:
The front camera has a resolution of 13 megapixels and takes decent selfies, which shouldn’t be enlarged too much.
Comparison of images:
Select a scene and navigate in the first image. One click changes the position on touchscreens. Clicking on the enlarged images opens the original in a new window. The first picture shows the scaled photo that was taken with the test device.
Display – bright screen in the Blu G90:
Blu has installed a 720p IPS display. In terms of resolution, there are higher quality screens in this price range, but this is less important in view of the size. It’s nice that the average brightness of 498 cd / m² is on a high level and can also be reached manually. However, we noticed that the minimum brightness is quite high, which can be annoying if you still look at your smartphone in bed in the evening.
The black level of the smartphone and thus also the contrast are on a decent level.We noticed a slight blue cast in our measurements with the spectrophotometer and the CalMAN software. The color deviations from the optimum are at a medium level.
Performance, emissions and battery life – more power would be good:
The MediaTek Helio A25 is a SoC that is actually used in even cheaper smartphones. So it is not surprising that smartphones like the Galaxy M21 from Samsung offer significantly more performance. If you only move around in the menu of the Blu G90 or perform simple activities, you will not notice the difference as much. As soon as it gets a bit more demanding, however, there can be strong stutters and delays, for example when adjusting the volume or opening the Android quick access menu.If you want to play on your mobile phone, you should limit yourself to very simple casual games.
The Blu G90 only heats up slightly and should therefore not cause problems even in a warm environment. The loudspeaker sounds very treble-heavy and brings almost no deep mids into the sound. At maximum volume, the highs sound uncomfortable in the ears and voices seem quite distant. The sound signals are transmitted cleanly via a 3.5mm connection and Bluetooth.
The 4,000 mAh battery brought the smartphone to almost 15 hours of running time in our WLAN test. This is a good value, but the American smartphone cannot keep up with the Samsung Galaxy M21. The battery is charged with a maximum of 10 watts, which takes 2 hours for a full charge.
Conclusion – affordable luxury?
The Blu G90 is certainly not a revolution in the cheap smartphone market and offers a little less performance for 200 euros. A modern and faster SoC would have been good for the smartphone, but at least it has decent WLAN speed and lasts quite a long time.
We are pleased that the screen can be bright, but at the same time, manufacturers should also consider the other end: the minimum brightness is quite high. The camera is surprisingly sharp in some scenarios, but in low light it can only show a few details. You get a class-class lens here, but it’s not as flexible as with even more modern smartphones.
The Blu G90 is a good, inexpensive mid-range smartphone, but not for performance-hungry users.The “luxury” advertised by the manufacturer might be found in the stylishly designed back of our white test model, otherwise we would rather call the smartphone solid. In addition, it is only of interest to users who do not need a lot of performance.
Source: Blu G90
