US smartphone maker Blu has launched its first phone in the UK, the Vivo 6, as part of a wider plan to bring its devices to new markets around the world.
The handset is one of the higher-spec devices the US company has made, offering a 5.5-inch 1080p display, 4GB of RAM, 64GB of storage and a MediaTek Helio 10 1.8GHz Octa-Core processor. On paper, it’s certainly no slouch. Potentially less impressively, the rear-facing camera is only a 13-megapixel sensor – if photography is your key buying decision, the Vivo 6 probably isn’t the phone for you. On the front, there’s an 8-megapixel sensor for the obligatory selfies.
On the software side of things, the Vivo 6 offers a lightly tweaked version of Android Marshmallow that mostly keeps things as you’d expect them, with the exception of the quick settings normally found with a swipe down from the top of the screen. Now, quick actions (like switching Bluetooth on/off, etc.) are found with a swipe up from the bottom of the screen instead, but notifications remain at the top.
There’s no removable battery, but it is a 3,150mAh unit and the handset does support microSD cards up to 64GB.
Perhaps the most interesting thing about the Vivo 6 is the price, however. At £239.99, it offers a great balance of specs for money, provided the hardware can live up to the promises it makes on paper. It’s also available, for a limited time, for just £184.99 from Amazon UK as part of a Black Friday promotion.
Blu, which stands for ‘Bold Like Us’, says that if the UK launch is successful, it’ll consider bringing devices to other countries in mainland Europe too.
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Editorial independence means being able to give an unbiased verdict about a product or company, with the avoidance of conflicts of interest. To ensure this is possible, every member of the editorial staff follows a clear code of conduct.
Professional conduct
We also expect our journalists to follow clear ethical standards in their work. Our staff members must strive for honesty and accuracy in everything they do. We follow the IPSO Editors’ code of practice to underpin these standards.