Review: Blu R1 HD

I started to enjoy the Blu R1 HD a lot more as soon as I let go of the word “better.”

That’s usually the word reviews pivot around, after all. Is this camera better than that one? Is this interface more responsive? Does this battery last long enough (probably not)? The Blu R1 HD asks an entirely different question, though. The only benchmark it needs to clear is: Can you believe this only costs $60? And honestly, I still can’t.

Let’s back up for a minute, because Blu isn’t a name most people know—this is not the e-cig company, please do not try to vape this phone—and that price tag comes with a few important caveats.

Blu itself is easy enough to explain. It’s a smartphone company, based in Florida, that specializes in surprisingly affordable hardware that runs minimally tweaked Android firmware. As for the caveats, its R1 HD is one of two phones that are Prime Exclusives, a new program that gives Amazon Prime members steep discounts on devices in exchange for allowing ads on their lock screens, in their notifications, as well as on a suite of preinstalled Amazon apps. The other is the Moto G4, the latest in an established lineage of high-quality, inexpensive phones. That one starts at $150 with offers and ads—plenty cheap, but it’s got nothing on the R1 HD.

The entry level, ad-laden R1 HD costs $50, which nets you 8GB of storage and one measly gig of RAM. For 10 bucks more, you can double both of those. Unless you’re a Hamilton away from affording a critical blood transfusion, it’s worth stepping up. Buying it with no ads at all will cost you $100 or $110, respectively.

We might as well talk about the specs, too, although if you care much about specs you’re not the target audience for this phone. Still, they’re better than you’d expect for something that costs about what you’d spend on a 3-D movie date. There’s a 1.3 GHz quad-core processor powering the operation, a 5-inch, Gorilla Glass 3 (a generation behind, but still hearty) HD display, and 5MP/8MP front and rear cameras. None of which can compare to last year’s flagships, much less the latest leaders, but still, not bad, considering!

Performance matters more than numbers, though, and for that Blu gives mixed results. The good news is that it’s entirely usable day to day. I don’t say that to damn it with faint praise; there are plenty of more expensive phones that are barely functional nightmare machines. Here, though, swipes are smooth, and less intensive game experiences were fine; I was able to catch a Pidgey or two without any hiccups. Video, too, streamed seamlessly, although watching Amazon’s original series All or Nothing was an unfortunate reminder that the R1 HD’s display is dim and lacks crispness. Its speakers are tinny enough to make even Jon Hamm’s voiceover sound like it was recorded into a tuna can. Audio-visual mediocrity aside, there were very few times the R1 HD got its gears stuck. It’s surprisingly reliable.

Hewing close to stock Android helps. There are a few Blu-imbued flourishes here and there, like the ability to set audio profiles in the swipe-down settings menu, and a camera app that’s as feature-filled as the camera itself is disappointing. For the most part, though, this is very recognizably Android 6.0.

Well, except for all the Amazon apps. There are a dozen of them installed on the R1 HD when it arrives (assuming you get the Prime Exclusive version). That didn’t bother me much. You can’t find some of them, like Amazon Video, in the Google Play store, so it saved me the hoop-jumping that getting some Amazon apps on Android normally requires. What does rankle some is that you can’t delete any of them. That includes apps like Prime Now, a service that’s not even available in my city (it’s only in 27 right now) and Audible, for which I don’t have an account and don’t intend to get one.

The R1 HD comes with the standard suite of Google apps as well, which you also can’t delete. In all, you’re getting a 16GB phone with roughly two dozen apps that you can’t get rid off. You can plop in a microSD card for expandable memory, but as is, you don’t have a ton of space to work with.

There are other, very mild inconveniences to a phone in Amazon’s ecosystem. Photos head straight for Amazon Drive, rather than the backup of your choosing, though it’s easy enough to set up Google Photos or Dropbox as well. Overall, though, if you’re even a semi-regular Amazon user, there’s more to like here than to gripe about.

And then there are the ads. Big, bold ads every time you wake up your smartphone. Ads for mascara, ads for wireless earbuds, ads for Wild Frontier dog food (#1 ingredient real salmon!). Ads in your notification bar that can be easily swiped away and ignored. As far as trade-offs go, it’s not as bad as I was expecting. By now I’ve even gotten used to seeing Zendaya shilling Covergirl instead of the photo of my two toddlers that occupies my Nexus 5. If anything, and I almost can’t believe I’m saying this, I wish the ads were at all targeted, and had a little more variety. I look at my phone dozens of times a day, and what gets me most isn’t the repeated ad blitz, but the repetition. Presumably, as more ad partners sign on, they’ll be able to mix and match a little more acutely.

There’s more to say about the hardware, probably, but going much deeper feels like holding a Big Mac extra value meal to French Laundry standards. This isn’t an iPhone, but it also costs an order of magnitude less than one. The camera? Terrible, don’t use it. The build quality? Sturdy but bulky. Does its vibration mode sound like a deep wheeze sometimes? Sure it does.

But guess what? None of that matters. This is the phone for when you break your real phone and need to fill the gap until you’re ready for a true upgrade. This is the phone you get if you feel like your life would benefit from a second smartphone but don’t want to commit to the idea. Better still, this is the phone you don’t get, but use as a baseline for how inconceivably good and how cheap smartphones have gotten.

The Blu R1 HD isn’t better than anything. But it’s still plenty good.