Every Android fan who made fun of the iPhone X’s notch — that would be almost all of us, including myself — need to swallow our pride and take the L, because Apple has won (again). The notch is in. Not officially yet, I guess, but soon — when Huawei and LG unveil its notched-out phones in the coming weeks and months. But the writing was already on the wall at the Mobile World Congress, when most lesser known brands offered some variation of the notch.
(There are, however, a couple of Chinese phonemakers who came up with creative ways to avoid the notch, and for that I applaud. Same too, to Samsung, for not deviating from its own design language with the Galaxy S9)
One of these earliest notch copycats is the Oukitel U18. Unlike the iLA X I tested last month that had a fake notch, the U18 has a real one, with apps that fill both corners next to the notch.
Oukitel, a small brand based in Shenzhen, is known for making big, bulky phones with giant batteries — last July I tested one of its phones that lasted an entire week on a single charge – and the U18 sort of strays from that … a little bit. It’s certainly more sleek and curvy than the company’s previous handsets, but it’s still a bit chunky, because it’s got a 4,000 mAh battery inside.
The phone’s front — as if you need me to say this after seeing the top photo — is obviously a blatant clone of the iPhone X. But what gave me a good chuckle was that Oukitel managed to borrow from the Huawei Mate 10 Pro’s design for the device’s back. So this phone has an iPhone face, Huawei back.
With a cell of that size powering just a 720p 5.8-inch display, I expected the U18 to be a workhorse and I was not disappointed. Throughout a week of testing, the phone lasted me a full two days on every charge.
Packed inside are all the usual budget Chinese phone internals: a MediaTek Octa-core MT6750 processor with 4GB of RAM. Doing basic smartphone things such as sending emails and checking Facebook won’t be a problem at all. Even heavy gaming — the graphic intensive Tekken — is fine (though the phone gets a bit hot).
But if you want to take photos and videos, then you have to lower your expectations. Oukitel claims there’s a 16-megapixel and 5-megapixel dual camera set-up on the back, but as usual the secondary camera is suspect — I can cover the lens and see no difference in photos at all. The main lens can capture acceptable photos with proper lighting and a still object, but the image is still overall soft and low on clarity. I was surprised by the quality of the 2X zoom, however.
Photos in low light situations are fine if you use them for social media or mobile-driven websites. Blow them up to full size and you’ll see a lot of noise.
Considering that Oukitel is selling this phone for around US$165, I suppose you really can’t complain about the camera capabilities. You are, after all, getting a device that has a very high screen-to-body ratio, and if you place it next to the iPhone X and squint, you can’t even tell which phone is the one that costs five times as much.
So, about that notch. The next version of Android will be optimized so the software can work around the notch, but the U18 will likely never get updated to that version (it’s still on Android 7.0 right here). So expect some UI experience to be impacted by a random cutout at the top of the display. For example, you can’t even pull down the notification shade if you swipe from the top of the screen that meets the notch — the software doesn’t know there’s a notch there that had cut off part of the display — so instead you can only bring down the notification panel by swiping around the notch. These are little bugs that the big companies like Huawei and LG will surely figure out when they release their notch devices, but on the Oukitel, it is what it is.
Most apps actually cut off before the notch begins (YouTube, for example, so don’t worry about the notch cutting into videos), but some, like Google Maps, will stretch all the way. I quite like the look.
There’s “face unlock” too here, but I’d advise against using it because it’s slow and very easy to be tricked. At least the fingerprint reader is accurate and placed in a sensible location.
In all the U18 is a standard budget Chinese phone from a smaller Shenzhen brand, but it is notable for being the first of the notches to hit store shelves ready to go.
