Meanwhile it shouldn't be a secret anymore that we kinda love Siswoo as a company. It just is so nice to see a young company paying so much attention to details about how they build devices, arrange their line-up and run their company (especially the expansion part). Siswoo aren't just launching as many devices as possible like a few other manufacturers do (yep, we point at you, Elephone), but actually think about what they are doing. A big pro about Siswoo obviously is their customer care. They are currently expanding to Europe and just opened a service center in Spain with another center following soon in Germany. They even called back a few devices recently to replace them with units that do work properly for free – this is something I have never seen a Chinese company doing outside of their home country. Time for a first review of a Siswoo device, and for this we picked the Siswoo C50 Longbow which kindly has been provided to us by the German reseller www.androidfiguren.de. At €139 (official price in Germany), this is probably the cheapest 64-bit LTE device available in this country right now. So lets not waste any more time talking and get right into the review!
Unboxing
The Siswoo C50 Longbow comes in a standard phone box that got a rather simple black and white design. It features a small Siswoo logo and the product name on the top, some specs and the package contents on the rear. Unfortunately Siswoo did a little mistake and declares the SoC with 1.5GHz. In reality it is 1.3GHz, but that's probably a mistake and not intended. The Siswoo website URL is printed as well, www.siswoo.com. Inside the box you get the phone, a wall charger with 1A and a localized plug, a USB cable, a screen protector and a well printed quick start guide that also contains a short troubleshooting guide.
Design
Since the Siswoo C50 Longbow isn't expensive at all considering the specs, we didn't expect that much from the phones build quality and have been surprised to see a perfectly put together unit. Yep, it's made from plastic entirely, but that doesn't necessarily have to be a bad thing – and it isn't. The Siswoo C50 feels very nice in the hand mostly due to its amazing flat rear which is covered with a rubber-like material, making it feel smooth and silky while offering hell of a lot of grip. The phone will never slip out of your hands nor from any surface. Also the frame of the handset is nicely done. While the edges are slightly curved, the sides themselves are flat. This doesn't only cut down in width but also increases the comfy feel in the hand once more. The only thing we dislike a bit is the missing status LED and the non-backlit touch buttons. Anyway, the latter ones at least feature reflective, silver icons which means you still can see them in low light. All along, nothing significant to complain there.
Display
We don't know who makes the screen of the Siswoo C50 Longbow, but whatever supplier Siswoo did choose, they didn't make a mistake. At the very first look you surely won't be able to tell that this is "only" a 5-inch 720p panel. You really need to place a 1080p device next to it to see a small difference in sharpness. But besides of that the screen offers superior color, contrast and brightness performance that leaves nothing to be desired. The digitizer is working absolutely flawless and with near to no input lag as well. The glass surface is smooth, letting the finger glide across it effortlessly. Scratch-proofness seems to be there as well since to date we couldn't spot a damage.
Hardware
The Siswoo C50 Longbow is the first ever device with the Mediatek MT6735 SoC we test. This chipset is part of Mediatek's new World Mode LTE line-up. Basically this chipset is kind of a beefed-down version of the MT6732 SoC being clocked at 1.3GHz and equipped with a Mali T720 GPU and in exchange offering an on-board modem with support for all LTE frequencies used globally. Now a lot of people wonder how the performance of this chipset is. Well, you won't notice any difference compared to the MT6732M as long as you only use the Android 5.0 Lollipop and Apps. Only when you start playing games you will notice the weak GPU, which still is capable to run a lot of games smoothly but is certainly struggling with graphic intense games at highest settings like Modern Combat 5, Real Racing 3 and that stuff. Still, it's a great entry-level SoC, on-par with the Snapdragon 410.
A bunch of critics goes to the Siswoo C50 Longbow directly and not to the MT6735 SoC. First of all, the handset only comes with 1GB of RAM. This is not much and those of you constantly using more than 3 apps at a time won't be satisfied with that. In the end, only those of you who never use multi-tasking and close their apps on a regular basis will be satisfied with 1GB of RAM. Please keep that in mind while purchasing this handset. Another flaw is the memory of only 8GB. The stock ROM is kinda large due to some bloatware apps pre-installed (nothing Chinese, can be uninstalled), leaving you only about 4GB of free memory. Since you can't move apps to SD cards with Android 5.0 Lollipop, this quickly becomes and issue if you install a huge number of apps or some large games.
There are a few positive things to mention though. First of all, the vibrator of this phone is very good considering the low price. I guess most of you are used to Chinese phones rumbling and making lots of noise while vibrating, but with the Siswoo C50 Longbow this is not the case. You almost can't hear the device vibrating, which is a pro. Another thing we like is that Siswoo built-in an Infrared blaster that you can use to control IR-controlled devices like TVs, TV boxes or ACs. This works like a charm and the necessary application comes with it as well.
Software
The Siswoo C50 Longbow comes with Android 5.0 Lollipop pre-installed, and it is running a lot smoother than on most MT6732 and even MT6752 devices. The reason for this probably is better optimization since those World Mode LTE processor are shipped with Lollipop since day one and have never seen KitKat like the MT6732/52 did. The result is a very nice Lollipop experiences and the number of bugs isn't that huge, but there are a few more significant bugs that will be mentioned later on. Expect those to be fixed soon!
Audio
Telling you the truth, we've been blown away with the audio quality the Siswoo C50 Longbow does offer. Really, it is far beyond anything you'd expect at this price level (about $110 directly from China). The internal speaker is loud, does not distort, sounds very clear and offers a decent bass playback. It indeed is usable for some music in case you are not able to use headphones at the given time. In case you decide to use headphones, make sure you use good once since the phone can handle those, resulting in a very nice audio experience. Furthermore, the audio quality while doing calls is above average. On both ends the audio sound very clear, confirming a very good receiver and mic.
Reception Quality
Flawless and way above average. That probably are the expectations you have for high-end devices when it comes to reception quality. Would you be surprised if we told you that the Siswoo C50 Longbow performs very similar to high-end flagships in this area? Well, actually that's the truth and it simply is amazing not to worry about getting a 3G signal for data connection most of the time. And the same thing applies to Wi-Fi and Bluetooth as well. It works absolutely flawlessly, which is a breeze after some of the recent disappointments. The only thing which doesn't work properly yet is GPS. But don't worry, that's one of those software bugs that need to be fixed. The accuracy is very limited, it can not get a fix for GLONASS satellites and it looses GPS connection from time to time. The next update is supposed to fix that, and we are sure it will do since the antenna apparently isn't the problem here according to the signal strength displayed for single satellites.
Camera
The Siswoo C50 Longbow comes with a 8 mega pixel rear camera and a 5 mega pixel front shooter. In reality the sensors operate at 6 and 4 mega pixels and the 8 / 5 mega pixels are done with interpolation. Still, Siswoo apparently have been paying attention to which sensor they choose, since the results look a lot better than what some of the 13 mega pixel phone cameras out there produce – one more proof for the fact that mega pixels are not what you should be after when judging quality of a camera. Of course you shouldn't expect the Siswoo C50 Longbow to do shots on the level of high-end camera phones, but the results are definitely good enough to show em to your friends and family without being embarrassed. Colors are very good and sharpness is as well for the price range we are moving in here. The camera furthermore performs nicely within the HDR mode, but has some issues with compensating movements. Another thing we loved about the camera is the exposure time. You can take pictures of moving objects (check the rabbit on the field at one of the samples below) and they are still sharp – great for people who wanna take pictures of sports events. Only when it comes to low-light situations the camera starts to have a hard time. Noise reduction is good, but the picture start to become unsharp then. The LED flash can't change much about that, since it is not bright enough to light up a whole room. The same btw. applied to the flash of the front camera as well. Video recordings of the rear camera look acceptable and audio quality is good. The microphone could be set to a more sensitive level though.
Battery
The battery is one of the most amazing parts of the Siswoo C50 Longbow, not only because 3,000mAh are an impressive amount of capacity for a 5-inch budget phone, but because of the fact that Siswoo don't lie to their customers as well. The battery indeed does feature 3,000mAh and the battery life is better than what we expected. More than 10 hours of screen-on time are not hard to reach at all, getting you through more than a day with a single charge easily. The only flaw is that there is no fast-charging which means it will take up to 4 hours to fully charge the battery. Also, there is some bug that somehow causes the battery-level to do jumps – another one of those software bugs left to fix.
Siswoo C50 Longbow Review: Verdict
Wow! It's been a while since we tested such a good budget phone. Let's quickly put everything we learned together again: The Siswoo C50 Longbow is an extremely cheap device (especially in Germany) which offers above-average specs at this price level, all that from a manufacturer that has a presence in Europe and actually seems to care about its clients. This alone makes the Siswoo C50 Longbow very attractive. But it doesn't stop there. Take into account the nice build quality, the gorgeous display, the great reception quality, battery life and camera, you know you will quickly fall in love with this device in case you can live with 1GB of RAM. Really, that's the only significant flaw along the few software bugs that are left to fix. That being said, it really is a pity that we can't keep our review sample this time. Anyway, full purchase recommendation from our side!
Thanks to Androidfiguren.de for shipping the sample to us.
| Category | Value |
|---|---|
| Model: | Siswoo C50 Longbow |
| Processor: | Mediatek MT6735 (4x Cortex A53 @1.3GHz) |
| GPU: | Mali T720 |
| RAM: | 1GB |
| Memory: | 8GB |
| Frequencies: | GSM 850/900/1800/1900MHz, WCDMA 900/1900/2100MHz, FDD-LTE 800/1800/2600MHz |
| Screen: | 5-inch 1280 x 720 |
| Camera Front: | 5MP |
| Camera Rear: | 8MP |
| SIM: | Dual Micro SIM |
| Micro SD: | Yes (128GB) |
| Sensors: | Direction, Acceleration, Light, E-Compass, Proximity |
| Housing: | Polycarbonate |
| Dimensions: | 142 x 74 x 9mm |
| Weight: | 147g |
| Accessories: | Wall charger, USB cable, guide, screen protector |
| OS: | Android 5.0 Lollipop |
EmoticonEmoticon