Umidigi F3s Review – When Smartphones Are Too Expensive

. Remember. Last year you were able to get an affordable phone with the right amount of upgrades with specs and features that feel bang for the buck. Today. That seems impossible.. Thanks to the pandemic, the smartphone industry has finally felt the effects and we, the consumers, are currently paying for it. Literally.. That said, this paves way for cheaper phones like the Umidigi F3s, which costs 159.99.. All the links are in the description below if youre interested., But Umidigi is basically another smartphone company that only started in 2012., Although you may havent heard of them. Yet they are servicing over 20 countries around the world already, including the Philippines. And on their website, where you can find the F3s you can order this phone directly from them or through Aliexpress.. Nevertheless, this phone, the F3s, is neither a cheap nor a mid range phone.. Its a budget phone that doesnt try to do it all at a certain price point, nor try to be the cheapest option on the market. And for a budget phone it does perform like a budget phone, especially in one category, which is the camera. So right off. The bat the F3s is sporting, three cameras on the back, a 5MP macro camera, an 8MP ultrawide and a 48MP Sony camera, which is on paper, should be a good shooter. Since 48MP is still a lot of megapixels and Sony. Sensors on smartphones have been the leading optics provider.. Then you have a 16MP selfie camera on the front.

Thats housed inside a teardrop notch. Again its a budget phone. So I understand why they couldnt opt for a pinhole in the center or corner., But for the quality of photos and videos you get out of these sensors, its not good. Its, not even OK., Its just passable or usable.. Yes, you can take some photos and videos with this phone, but they look like they came from the early 2000s. Theyre soft bland with almost no HDR effect and slow to process.. I mean the stock camera app, which lets you shoot up to 1080p video on the back and 720p video on the front is slow to capture and process, regardless of the background apps, the phone has. Youre better off downloading a third party camera app, although you need To deal with annoying ads and some workarounds to make the ultrawide work because Android being Android third party, camera apps, still dont offer ultrawide support.. The other slow thing I wanted to point out is the charger., The F3s only support 10W for the massive 5150mAh battery.. You basically have to wait nearly three hours to go from empty to full.. Fortunately, the battery life itself has been really solid on this one. I easily average 7 hours of screen time in a single day and on the days where I mostly use the phone passively. Like listening to music or podcast, I can still get around 4 hours of screen time in two days worth of use.

. I do have to mention that the speaker is one of the disappointing things about the F3s.. Not only is it single firing and easily gets covered in landscape mode, but its output isnt that loud. Whats even worse, is that the last volume tick is 90 percent of the time. The only audible volume level in most of my use cases.. As soon as you drop from that last tick, the speaker gets really really weak.. Basically, what Im trying to say is that the volume slider is imbalanced on this phone.. Fortunately, thats, where the not so good things end for this phone. Now lets go to the good things about this phone.. The first is the design.. The F3s is an all plastic phone, but the uses a curved composite finish that doesnt seem to attract any smudge at all.. The Matte Silver finish here really feels clean and smooth in the hand, and you can also get this in black gold and two more shades of blue., But lets address the elephant in the room that tagline on the back is not for me.. Maybe some of you prefer more branding on the back, but I wish they just stuck with Umidigi.. I also like the way the camera hump looks. Its clean and they didnt try to fool the consumers with more sensors.. All three serve their purpose, albeit in a passable way.. The fingerprint scanner is embedded in the power button, together with the volume rocker and its fast and accurate.

. The other side houses a hybrid 4G SIM tray opening a slot for a microSD storage expansion of a second SIM. But the extra button here is dubbed as a smart key by Umidigi.. So in the settings under the smart key, you can set three shortcuts to do a certain action or open an application., And I actually like this implementation. Since there are certain actions, I want to be done as soon as it crosses my mind.. The only annoying thing here is that the button is so easy to press. Whenever I pick up the phone, so I had to disable the single click function to prevent accidental presses0. Up top. You still have the headphone jack. And, of course, the speaker and the USB C port are down at the bottom. For a 6.7 inch phone. The F3s is on the tall side, meaning its still quite manageable. With one hand., The screen is locked at 60Hz, which is still fine for a budget phone and although the colors and sharpness are about as budget as they can get, Im quite surprised to see the option to play up to 4K resolution. Videos on youtube with the F3S., I mean sure this is a 720p display, but it still helps in displaying sharper video quality, at least for someone whos used to testing out devices of different tiers. And, at the very least, the display has sufficient light to withstand bright Indoor environments., The only issue I have with the display is that it has trouble recognizing my third screen touch when playing battle.

Royale games like CoD or PUBG., So for those who use a claw grip in games. Like me, this may impede your in game performance. Since were on the topic of performance. The F3s is sporting Unisoc T610 chip with Mali, G52 GPU., So its an octa core SoC with two performance cores and six efficiency cores. In Geekbench, 5, its ever so slight, faster than the Snapdragon 660. A chip released back in 2017. Thats, basically five years ago.. But to Umidigis credit they paired the F3s with stock Android. So, thanks to that, the general performance of the F3s is stable at best., I have not encountered a single lag nor stutter in the UI and though the animations look slow for someone whos used to higher refresh rates its not really a deal breaker for users who Dont mind the standard 60Hz.. You can also play some of the tenured games out there like mobile legends and the newer ones like diablo immortal, but you have to set your expectations right with newer games., Oh and buried in the settings is notification history.. So you can check your most recent dismissed notifications as well as the last 24 hours per app, a really handy feature if youre a notification freak like me. And also theres NFC on this phone. Neat., So thats the F3s. Again, this is a budget phone, so some Features are expected to disappoint some of you out there.. Would I recommend this phone to people who have access to other brands like realme and Xiaomi, probably not, But for those who have limited access to phones where Umidigi can deliver their products? Quite literally, the F3s is solid as a basic smartphone to surf the internet and communicate with friends without dealing with the complications and ad plagued Android operating system.

. In other words, if youre looking for a phone for a kid or adult whos, not particular with their devices, the F3s is an option out. There. Thats it. Drop a sub or a like. If you like, supporting the channel.