Bluboo may be a company that you’ve never heard of, seeing as they are based out of Shenzhen, China. They make, mostly, mid-range smartphones like the Bluboo Xfire, XTouch and now the X9. We have our hands on the Bluboo X9, which is their latest smartphone and packs a 5-inch 1080p display. On top of that, we’re looking at the MediaTek MT6753 octa-core processor here with 3GB of RAM and just 16GB of storage. All of this is powered by a 2500mAh battery. Now, obviously it’s a bit too early to talk about battery life, since we’ve only been using the phone for less than a day, but we should have some decent battery life here.
What’s surprising about the Bluboo X9 is that it’s – for the most part – running a stock version of AOSP (Android Open Source Project). Here we have a number of AOSP apps like the browser and messaging, but all of the Google apps are available here as well. This is Android 5.1 Lollipop, so it’s somewhat up-to-date. It’s not Android 6.0 Marshmallow, but it’s not far behind either. No soft-buttons here on the X9, instead we have a home button that is actually an X, and it looks pretty sweet. On the left side is the menu button and a back button on the right. No recents button, but if you long-press the home button you’ll get into recents.
The Bluboo X9, so far, looks to be a pretty incredible smartphone coming out of China, but what’s even more surprising is its price tag. You can pick one up for just under $150 USD. For what you get here, it’s hard to beat that. Hard to say if we’d recommend this over other phones like the Moto G 2015, Alcatel OneTouch Idol 4S, and other sub-$300 smartphones right now. But we’ll have a much better verdict in our full review, which will be on the way soon. In the meantime, check out our unboxing of the Bluboo X9 down below. There are a few goodies included – but no headphones unfortunately. Which appears to be becoming the norm these days.