The CUBOT H1 Smartphone Test: A Month with 3-4 Days of Battery per Charge
by Ian Cutress on December 23, 2015 9:01 AM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- Mobile
- Battery
- CUBOT
Benchmarks
It seems somewhat silly to run performance benchmarks when most media outlets talk about high performance smartphones most of the time, but my point to consider is my old phone, and whether moving from quad core Krait 300 at 1.7GHz to a MediaTek quad core A53 chipset at 1.0 GHz but running a newer Android is better or worse. For some of the regular smartphone tests I don’t actually own the prerequisite hardware of our smartphone team, but here are some tests I was able to run, and the devices I had to hand at the time:
| Devices on Hand for Testing | |
| Cubot H1 | MediaTek 6735P |
| HTC Desire 610 | Snapdragon 400 |
| HTC One Max | Snapdragon 600 |
| Huawei Mate S | Kirin 935 |
| Huawei Nexus 6P | Snapdragon 810 |
| Google Nexus 7 2013 | Snapdragon S4Pro |
| Amazon Fire HD 6 (Limited) | MediaTek MT8135 |
| OnePlus X | Snapdragon 801 |
When we talk about Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 400 family or Intel's partnership with Rockchip partnership for Sofia and Atom, it makes me somewhat sad we don't have many new data points to compare to the MediaTek MT6735P inside the Cubot H1. However the one benchmark were all interested in is the battery life:
So let's put it this way - the H1 on a full charge breaks the Geekbench3 test to the point that it thinks you are cheating. Oops.
With the PCMark test it gets over 15hrs compared to the 6hrs of the Galaxy S6. When you have a large battery and not many pixels to push, with the right efficiency the device will last a night out with only 25% left in the tank in the way that high end smartphones do not. Anecdotally, as I'm writing this, I just spent a few hours in meetings across the other side of London - I spent 30 minutes each way on the tube with Evernote open and being used (albeit with no wireless or updates), and the battery went down from 38% to 33%. That's an hour of solid writing with black text on white for at most 5% of battery.
Initial use, first battery run down and more aggressive use
When I first started using the H1, the graph on the left was my battery usage estimation. Saying ‘approximiately 4 days left’ is almost unheard of, but with a regular 10% screen on time, the result was the graph in the middle, successfully predicting four days of battery. On the right is another example of my use, although a little bit more aggressive with some charging. Yes, I can confirm that there seems to be something wrong with those percentage calculations. But a quick charge in airplane mode for a few minutes gives a few percentage points of battery – while a lot of smartphones offer quick charging for the capacity to fill quickly, it still depends on the capacity drain of the SoC. It helps to have the best of both worlds. Of course, the downside of this is that it can take 3hrs and up to fully charge the H1. The H1 does come with a cable so you can charge other devices though, as 5200 mAh matches some battery packs.
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raja_jagadeesan - Wednesday, December 23, 2015 - link
Fascinating review. Thanks for exploring one of these no-name knockoffs. Amazing what can be had at this price point, and even more amazing that it can offer a surprisingly good experience, and even some things - like crazy battery life - that the high-end phones can't.A very useful review - thanks anandtech for doing things like this.
benedict - Wednesday, December 23, 2015 - link
The Chinese manufacturers provide phones with amazing value for the price. I bought a Meizu M2 Note for 150$ and I'm amazed how good a 150$ phone can be. Also in that price range are Xiaomi Redmi Note 3 and Lenovo K3 Note. All of those feature great midrange specs and unless you really stress your phone those 8-core Mediatek cpus do a great job.ruthan - Wednesday, December 23, 2015 - link
I looked for new phone 2 month ago, i wanted 4 inch phone with not more weight that 115g, i ended with Galaxy S4 mini.I didnt care about money - but more powerful phone with same form factor doesnt exist - or doesnt exist in PhoneArena database.. It was big compromise - performace is limited, 8 GB storage is pain in ass and MHL is missing, but still better than 200 gram brick in my pocket..
PrinceGaz - Thursday, December 24, 2015 - link
Fellow S4 Mini user here; great small and light phone whose main drawback I find is the 8GB storage. Even after rooting and using something like Folder Mount to link app folders to an SD card, as well as moving the apps to SD using the normal method, that 8GB is still a squeeze.I reckon its performance is pretty good actually; its 1.7 GHz dual-core Krait 300 will outperform the 1.4 GHz or thereabouts quad-core A53 you'll find on similar small phones in most real-world situations, though it's probably better not to use it for demanding games as the GPU is rather lacking.
Weight as well as cost was a major factor in my going for the S4 Mini, but if your weight budget extended slightly to 130g, then nothing currently available beats the Sony Z3 Compact-- an absolute beast, albeit at a much higher price.
Sttm - Wednesday, December 23, 2015 - link
3-4 day battery life just doesn't seem as important now that we have fast charging, wireless charging, and in a lot places now convenient charging ports.amdwilliam1985 - Thursday, December 24, 2015 - link
speak for yourself, I take extreme battery life (3 to 7 days) over fast charging any day.blzd - Thursday, December 24, 2015 - link
Not if it means 5 year old performance and phone quality.A Moto G with 2400mAh or so already lasts 2 days easily with 5+ hours SoT, but doesn't have quick charge.
2 day battery life with quick charging is more than enough. How often do you go 2 days away from an outlet?
Currently rapid charging is getting devices to about 50% in 30 minutes of charging or less.
MikeMurphy - Thursday, December 24, 2015 - link
Lenovo recently released some interesting budget options with very large batteries, too. Anandtech should do a battle of the jumbo batteries.NZtechfreak - Thursday, December 24, 2015 - link
What is your 64gb card formatted to? I expect this phone will take cards of any size if they are formatted to Fat32. For reference I've used 128gb Fat32 formatted cards with things like my old 808, and used a Fat32 formatted 64gb drive with devices as old as my N82 and N95.PrinceGaz - Thursday, December 24, 2015 - link
I was going to ask that too. My Tesco Hudl2 tablet (a UK-only device) officially only supports up to 32GB cards, and couldn't read my 64GB SDXC card when I put it in, but did provide an option to format it. After doing that, it was FAT32 and could use the whole 64GB. If the Cubot doesn't provide an option to format the card, you could always format it on your PC to the desired FS using something like MiniTool Partition Wizard Free.