CloudFone Thrill 430X Shotgun Review
(Note from EIC: This is a guest post by one of our readers, Powel. This was originally posted as comment but it had so many good insights we asked his permission if we can republish it as a full review)
I bought a CloudFone Thrill 430x for my friend who came from the US last week. She’s in the US army and said she wanted a smart phone that has crazy high battery life and since the Lenovo p770 is not yet available, this is the unit I chose. Read on for my review.
CloudFone Thrill 430x Spec Sheet
- 1.2 GHz Dual Core Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 MSM8225 chipset
- 768MB RAM
- 4GB Internal Storage, Expandable up to 32GB via MicroSD
- 4.3-inch capacitive touchscreen, 960×540 resolution (~256ppi)
- 8.0-megapixel rear-facing camera with autofocus and LED Flash
- Can record 720p video
- 0.3-megapixel front-facing camera
- WiFi, WiFi Hotspot, Bluetooth 3.0, 3G HSDPA
- 4,160 mAh Battery
- Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich
Shotgun Review: Pros and Cons
PROS
- phoning functionality works fine, voice are clear, messaging gives you an option to send it to either sim just make sure you don’t accidentaly press the one from the other since they are sitting on top of each other
- great screen it’s bright and crisp
- navigating through the interface is smooth
- battery is the selling point of this phone and it’s no sham, lasted almost 2 days of heavy -usage (i.e. mobile internet, tethering, playing games and watching video clips)
- camera is good specially in daylight plus you have a physical shutter button
- the body is light but thick which houses the huge 4k mah battery which is just perfect for me (i don’t like thin phones and most people house their phones with 1 inch cases anyway)
- games ran fine but don’t expect high end games to run as smooth and anyway who plays serious games on their phones anyway? right?
- every smartphone feature that’s in the spec works.
CONS
- touch responsiveness, you have to repeat your action at times since it won’t detect your input the first time
- video playback, anything higher than 480p will lag even if you use 3rd party players (i.e MX, VLC, Mobo) but if it has a low resolution you will enjoy watching hours upon hours of videos
- the cloudphone pre-loaded app are crap, just don’t mind it
- the prices increased from 7.7k to 8.2k
- start up takes a while
- it froze on me one time so I had to restart but still won’t get past the startup screen. so removed the battery and the same then I removed the memory card and then it worked, might be just a glitch but just letting you guys know.
So far, so good. I’ve been using it for a week now and it’s better than other devices in the same price range. The main selling point of the Cloudfone Thrill 430x is that it’s a smartphone that can last days without charging even with moderate-heavy use. If you’re looking for something like that, then this is the phone for you.
Video: Cloudfone Thrill 430x in Action
We did a feature on the CloudFone Thrill 430x during one of the episodes of our podcast. You might want to watch it below. The segment on the CloudFone Thrill starts at around 9:00 (just fast forward).
This post was contributed by Powel (he’s planning on putting up a blog soon so we’ll link to that once it’s up!) and edited by Carlo Ople. Thanks Powel!