We
wish more brands would follow Umidigi’s example and release an affordable phone
with stock Android – the new A3S will launch with a promotional price of just US$ 60 and runs stock Android 10. Custom skins can be hit or miss, particularly
for small makers like Umidigi and it’s often the case that a half-baked skin
makes the experience of using entry-level hardware worse than it needs to be.
The
Umidigi A3S will be available on December 9 through AliExpress at $60. Note
that this is a promotional price and it will retail for $80. The phone is built around a 5.7” HD+
display and a MediaTek Helio A22 chipset. While the quad-core processor isn’t
blazing fast, the 12nm build process makes it reasonably efficient, which will
help stretch the endurance of the 3,950mAh battery. For charging, there’s and
old school microUSB port.
While
keeping the cost low, Umidigi still maanged a reasonably sounding trio of
cameras. There’s a 16MP camera on the rear with a 5MP depth sensor for portrait
shots, plus a 13MP selfie camera. The storage is only 16GB, but there’s a
microSD card so you can expand it according to your budget (up to 256GB).
The
Umidigi A3S also features dual LTE connectivity thanks to two SIM card slots. A
rear-mounted fingerprint reader and a 3.5mm headphone jack round off the specs. For an extra tenner - US$ 70 during the
promotional period – the Umidigi A3X offers similar specs except it upgrades to
3GB of RAM (up from 2GB) and extends the screen to 19:9 aspect ratio
(unfortunately, most of the gains are lost to the notch). You can find the two
models at the Umidigi AliExpress store.
