CUBOT C30

CUBOT C30 With 32MP Al Front Camera and Helio P60 Processor

Cubot is a Chinese manufacturer that has been bringing solid smartphones in the lower price range to the market for 8 years now. With the Cubot C30, we have the currently most powerful Cubot Smartphone.

With a display of 6.4 inches and dimensions of 157.05 x 76.44 x 8.5mm, this is an average-sized smartphone. The weight of 190 grams is also in the middle range. The housing of the smartphone consists of a glass back and a plastic frame and looks very noble. Both the display glass and the back proved to be resistant to scratches in our test. You should only pay attention to the glossy plastic frame a bit. But Cubot also includes a matching silicone protective cover in the scope of delivery for protection. The camera module protrudes one millimeter from the back.

From a design point of view, the smartphone follows the typical style of the year 2020, with the front side having very thin edges around the display (2.5mm at the sides and top, 5.5mm at the bottom). The display is interrupted by a small punch-hole notch for the front camera. Typical for an IPS display, there are small shadows around the notch, but these don’t catch attention in everyday life.

The Cubot C30 has a 6.4 inch display. As typical in the price range below $200, it is an IPS display. The resolution of 2310 x 1080 pixels is high enough to provide a 100% sharp picture without individually visible pixels. In terms of contrast, the Cubot X30 delivers solid standard values and black appears sufficiently deep. Even the dark mode can be used satisfactorily despite the IPS panel. The brightness is average at 480 cd/㎡. The display can still be read quite well outdoors as long as the sun doesn’t shine directly on the display.

Cubot uses the proven MediaTek MT6771, better known as the Helio P60, in the C30. The chip is manufactured in 12 nanometers and has eight cores in two clusters. Four ARM Cortex-A73 performance cores are responsible for the more demanding tasks and four ARM Cortex-A53 cores for simple tasks. The clock rate for all cores is 2.0 GHz. The Helio P60 is already in use in a number of Chinese mobile phones and has the performance of a Snapdragon 660. We found the system performance to be good to very good in most tests, and the Cubot C30 also ranks in this category. The system runs fast and without noticeable loading times. Even demanding apps can be used well and at most, there are only short jerks from time to time on complex websites or apps. Games can also be used well with the smartphone, but you’ll have to lower the detail level for more elaborate titles so that the rather weak Mali G72 GPU can cope with it. Then at least every game from the Playstore can be played.

In the Cubot C30, the chip has either 6/128GB or 8/256GB memory. Our version has 6GB of RAM and there are no limitations for multitasking. The 2GB more RAM shouldn’t play too big a role in the decision between the two versions. If at all, you should buy the larger version rather because of the 256GB memory. In any case, it is very pleasing that with 128 or 256GB you get quite a lot of memory for such a cheap smartphone. Furthermore, the memory has a very good speed of almost 200MB/s in writing and 500MB/s in reading.

The five cameras of theC30 occupy a special place in Cubot’s marketing. The specifications at least don’t look bad at first glance. The main sensor comes from Samsung, has 48MP and goes by the name of S5KGM1. We already know this sensor from the CUBOT X30, which is followed by an ultra-wide angle camera with 16MP, a macro camera with 5MP and a photosensitive camera with 0.3MP. What is a photosensitive camera? Good question. A quick search spits out lenses that get darker in a bright environment and lighter in a dark environment. This technique is probably used for sunglasses. In the Cubot C30, the camera probably serves to enhance night shots. But more about that in a moment. The Selfie camera has an above average high resolution of 32MP and works with pixel binning, just like the main camera.

The Cubot C30 has a 4200mAh battery on board. This is an average size for a 6.4 inch smartphone. The same can be said about the battery life of the smartphone. With 8.2 hours in the PC-Mark battery test, the Cubot C30 achieves a useful, but by no means particularly good runtime. Over the course of the day, you get an active usage time of up to 5 hours. Simple applications like YouTube only consume little battery power (about 8% per hour), while more intensive surfing, gaming or elaborate social media apps draw about 15-20% per hour from the battery. This is safe enough to get through the day even as a demanding user. However, the battery is only sufficient for two days if the mobile phone is hardly used at all.

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