You may remember Oukitel as one of the brands we tested for rugged phones, but they also make non-rugged phones (also[1] like tablets[2]), most of them sit in the lower segment, but the C50 we are testing today does include 5G connectivity.
First, let’s dive into the specs:
| guitar pick | Oukitel WP35 |
|---|---|
| Front view: | IPS LCD 6.8 inch 720 x 1600 @ 90 Hz, 258 PPI, 400 nits, 20:9 aspect ratio, Corning Gorilla Glass 5 |
| dimensions |
167.5 x 77.7 x 9.2 mm (6.59 x 3.06 x 0.36 in) |
| Weight: | 208 grams |
| Processor: |
MediaTek Dimensity 6100+ (6 nm), from eight cores, up to 2.2 GHz ARM Cortex-A76 cores @ 2.2 GHz*2 ARM Cortex-A55 cores @ 2.0 GHz*6 |
| GPU: | ARM Mali-G57 MC2 |
|
RAM: |
8 GB LPDDR5 (+ up to 16GB virtual) |
| storage: | 128 GB (UFS 2.1) + microSDXC (SIM slot) |
| Rear cameras: | Main camera 50 megapixels
Secondary camera 0.08 megapixel #2
0.08 megapixel secondary camera #3
|
| front camera: |
5 megapixel selfie camera
|
| Battery and charging | Li-Po 5150 mAh, non-removable 10 W wired |
| Connectivity: | nano+nano/nano+TF WiFi: IEEE802.11 a/b/g/n/ac 2.4/5G FM, OTG, VoLTE, Bluetooth 5.2 |
| NFC | No |
| Ports: | USB Type-C |
| Bands | GSM / WCDMA / TDD / FDD / 5G |
| G.P. ace: | GPS+GLONASS+Beidou+Galileo |
| resistance: Against drop height: |
No (0.8 m, 16 times) |
| security: | A fingerprint sensor is mounted on the side |
| material: | plastic |
| Operating System: | Android 14 |
| Colors: | bluegreen, gray, |
| MSRP: | $549.95 |
One thing that might immediately put you off is the price, however, this is only the manufacturers suggested retail pricing! When you go to the official website, you will quickly see that the purchase price is already 60% off at $219.98, which I can already tell you is much more realistic for what we get for this money. That puts it at the lower end of the 5G-enabled pricing scale. I’ve put the full bands it supports in the table below.
The colors offered on the product page along with the US, EU or UK charger option in the box are blue, gray and green. Ours is the blue version.
| Bands | |
|---|---|
| 2G: | B2/B3/B5/B8 |
| 3G: | WCDMA: B1/2/4/5/8 |
| 4G: | TDD: 38/39/40/41 FDD: B1/3/7/8/19/20/28AB |
| 5G: | N1/3/28/38/41/77/78 |
As you can see, this phone doesn’t even support US bands (yet) Oukitel says on its official Aliexpress store page:
Note: The C50 model is not yet available in an American version, so it cannot use SIM cards in the Americas and can only connect via WiFi. Production plans are underway, so stay tuned!
We don’t get flagship features here in terms of display or processor power. There is enough RAM and storage, and this storage can even be expanded with an SD card in this model.
Day 1
The first thing anyone will notice when unboxing is the weight. Weighing only 208 grams, it is quite light. Switching between this and my Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra made me wonder why my phone was so much heavier at 270g but maybe it’s because of the extra tech packed into it.
One thing I found a little comical about the specs, is that this phone is supposedly rated to be able to be dropped “16 times” from a height of 0.8 meters. Maybe on a pillow! I’m almost certain it was accidentally left over from a previous model for a rugged phone or something (which has the same exact specs). It is made of plastic, with Gorilla Glass 5 around the front. I have seen many phones protected by Gorilla Glass. Anyway, I didn’t bother drop testing this cheap and cheerful phone, in case you were wondering. However, there’s also a clear TPU case that ships with the C50, and it also came with a pre-installed screen protector.
I made a few calls on it, and the call quality was excellent, but that’s the minimum you should expect from any phone. The mono speaker was also loud enough when I switched the phone to speakerphone mode.
to design
The design isn’t much to write home about, it’s a typical candy shape with a triangular hump housing for the camera on the top left back that you’ll find on many smartphones. The case feels plastic as well, although the back is slightly textured and should prevent it from slipping, the sides are completely smooth, so it ends up feeling like it will slip out of my hand without the TPU case.
At the rear, the camera array consists of a 50-megapixel primary camera, along with two unspecified 0.08-megapixel cameras. To the right of the top camera is an LED flash. As I mentioned before, the back has a plastic feel, with a textured finish. The only thing it has, is that it feels good in the hand with the TPU case, because it is not very heavy either.
On the right side of the phone you will find two volume buttons and a power key that doubles as a fingerprint sensor. The keys are at a good height and are easily identified by feel. All these buttons are completely smooth.
On the left side, you’ll find the SIM card tray with a punch hole to access it. The SIM tray can hold a nano SIM and a TF card, or a nano + nano for a dual SIM option.
At the bottom, you’ll find a 3.5mm headphone jack port, and a USB Type-C charging port for the included 1m USB Type-C to USB Type-C cable and 10W charger. To the left of the USB port is a microphone hole, and to the right is the grill The only speaker.
The top of the C50 is mostly smooth except for a single pinhole that looks like another microphone.
On the front of the device above the display, you will find the 5 megapixel front camera. There’s no notification light, which is a bit of a letdown, as we have another phone with an IPS LCD screen that natively doesn’t support Always on Display, so a notification light was a good compromise. Additionally, the display is not protected other than Gorilla Glass 5 and the pre-installed screen protector, so when it’s lying face down, it rests directly on the display itself.
The C50 has a 6.8-inch screen, and is only 9.2mm thick. That weight also feels like it’s evenly distributed across the phone, the camera hump adding a few millimeters when the phone is lying on a flat surface.
display
The 6.8-inch FHD+ display has a screen resolution of 720 x 1600, with a pixel density of 258 PPI, an aspect ratio of 20:9 and Corning Gorilla Glass 5 protection. Oukitel claims that the screen has a peak brightness of 400 nits. It definitely showed as I had a really hard time seeing the screen in sunlight. It was just fine when I was taking photos indoors or in the shade.
It’s not fancy by any means, but I don’t plan on consuming media in 4K HDR anyway. The display is reasonable. As with most smartphones with a pinhole or teardrop camera, media like YouTube defaults to a 16:9 aspect ratio that puts black bars on the left and right of the video, but you can pinch out to fill the screen if you want, personally I find it distracting Consider stretching the media to the default values.
cameras
As I’ve said in previous smartphone reviews I’ve done, I’m not a fan of cameras. I’m a shooting point type, but it’s clear to me that smartphone manufacturers want to focus a lot on camera quality, sometimes at the expense of other features, and on paper at least, there’s no exception here either. On the back, we have a 50-megapixel rear shooter with F/1.8 ± 5% aperture and 77° FOV made by GalaxyCore. There are also two unspecified 0.08-megapixel cameras on the back that make up the triple array. I asked my contact what purpose they serve
Unfortunately, there is no optical image stabilization (OIS), which is a common omission in cheaper phones. There’s also no PDAF (Phase Detection Autofocus), which is a high-speed autofocus technology, and it shows up as you’ll see in some of my examples below.
Google gets around the lack of OIS on its Pixel phones by using a gyroscope for stabilization, but if that technology is included here, it hasn’t been revealed.
Gallery: Oukitel C50 Main Camera daylight
As you can see in the photos above, it was a little cloudy when the sun came through at times, the scene photos came out pretty well, except when shooting towards anything cloudy with a shadow, which resulted in a much darker image. Close-ups, as I’ve seen on other Oukitel, Blackview or Doogee rugged phones, not only showed the colors a bit too much, but thanks to the lack of PDAF most close-ups also resulted in an out-of-focus image. I also tried to take a picture of our main church using the zoom functionality, and it came out pretty bad.
Some of the photos were difficult to take because even with the adaptive display outside, at full brightness, it’s still hard to see what I’m shooting. I would say the camera just passes in taking scene photos in a well lit situation. No other samples fared well
Gallery: Oukitel C50 main camera at night
At one point I gave up on shooting outdoors, not only could I not see what I was shooting on the monitor unless it was lit, it was also incredibly difficult to get any shots in focus. I threw away a few that I took that ended up with light trails, probably because I was moving around a bit while shooting, even though I didn’t have this problem during the day.
software
The C50 ships with Android 14 with the April 2024 security update, just a few months old. However, in terms of software updates and support. You can expect a security update maybe once a quarter, and a warranty that lasts for a year.
The phone comes with a completely stock experience, with Android’s Quickstep home launcher. Oukitel doesn’t send their flavor of launcher on this phone like with all the rugged phones.
There’s no user-definable side key on this phone, and the display settings only let you toggle between Auto, 90Hz, or 60Hz. The Auto setting even lets you “force” 90Hz or 60Hz, whatever that means over the other settings on the previous settings page.
Performance and battery life
The phone offers charging through the wall charger at 10W and without a wireless option, and with a battery of 5,150 mAh. Oukitel claims it takes three hours to fully charge it at 10W.
The official webpage claims 655 hours (27.7 days) of standby time, 22.6 hours of talk time, 17.4 hours of music, 7.2 hours of gaming or streaming, and 6.3 hours of video playback, but I didn’t have this phone long enough to invoice.
For those who like metrics, there are some below. I started with GFXBench which tests the GPU.
Good to see it can hold its own against… pretty old competition like the NVIDIA Shield Tablet released in 2015, or the Samsung Galaxy S7 2016. It’s fine for light gaming, that’s about it.
Next, I ran Geekbench, which returned a score of 679, which was 51 points lower than the Oukitel WP27 with a single-core Helio G99 SoC, and 130 points lower at 1906 (compared to 2036) for Multi-Core. These processors continue to remain in the lower area of ​​the indices.
Last but not least, the AnTuTu benchmark tests reached 375,592 points, which is 31352 points lower than the Oukitel WP27. I couldn’t see how it ranked compared to other phones, as AnTuTu removed that figure from the comparison app.
The Oukitel C50 features the MediaTek Dimensity 6100+, which is an 8-core chipset announced in July 2023 and manufactured using a 6nm process technology. It Similar to Qualcomm Snapdragon 695 5GAlthough it is not beneficial in any way.
Summary
This phone isn’t going to break the bank at the discounted price (as of writing) of $219.98, which is the cheapest 5G phone I’ve tested so far. However, for that cost, you can only expect a year of support, plus only about four Android security updates that year.
For someone on a budget this phone will get you through the day, and as long as you’re shooting during the day you’ll be happy with the result. It has a few things going for it, like a 5,150mAh battery, 5G support, and a 90Hz display.
The Oukitel C50 is available starting today, June 17, and a US version will become available at a later, yet-to-be-announced date.
advantages
The 90Hz 5G display supports a large 5,150mAh battery
Disadvantages
No Amoled display, no LED notification, no wireless charging, bad cameras
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