Cloudfone Thrill 530qx Review

Ever since the creation of Android and iOS, battery life has been always a problem for our smartphones. When Symbian was still the best OS for mobile, the battery life of these smartphones at heavy use can reach up to 2 days. I remember having a Nokia phone with a week of battery life but today if your smartphone can last a day, we can already considered that your phone has a very long battery life. Most international brands focus on innovating their features like camera and display but most of them doesn’t really improve the battery life of their phones. There are only a few brands that really offer smartphones with a long battery life like Cloudfone. Remember the Cloudfone Thrill 430x? Yeah, I reviewed that phone a few months ago. Well, Cloudfone just released the Cloudfone Thrill 530qx, a quad-core Android smartphone with a very long battery life. So what’s in it for us? Check it out after the break.

I’ve tried this phone before and like what I’ve said before, despite having a big battery the Cloudfone Thrill 530qx isn’t that thick and I didn’t expect that it would be comfortable to hold for its size. The back has a rubber-like texture which adds more grip to the phone and the curves were kinda comfortable to hold too. The grip and box-like construction of the Cloudfone Thrill 430x was one of my main problems but they fixed that problem on the Cloudfone Thrill 530qx and they even brought a larger display in it without sacrificing comfortability. Remember, this phone has a 5.3″ display and it is quite thick because of its battery, that’s why it is important for the phone to have a comfortable design for a good grip.

There’s a LED notification light too on the phone which was a nice addition. The buttons on the phone were unique and it looks cool too. It reminds me of braille but hey, the design of the buttons aren’t needed to be discussed here. The display was upgraded to 5.3″ but the display was just qHD but don’t get me wrong, the display was quite good despite having a qHD resolution on a 5.3” display. Always remember that the qHD display would save more battery life than the HD displays even at the same size. But of course, it would still depend on the technology that they’ve used for the display.

The connectivity is complete except for LTE and NFC but that’s expected already, right? One thing that I really like on the phone is the included USB OTG on the box. Yeah, no need to buy a USB OTG because it already comes in the box. You could even use it as a power bank heeheehee. Inside it is a 4 GB internal storage. Again, you have to buy a MicroSD card for your apps and games. The audio quality of the Cloudfone Thrill 530qx wasn’t the best but it was acceptable.

Here we go. The battery life of the Cloudfone Thrill 530qx is probably one of the best in the market. The Cloudfone Thrill 530qx manage to last up to a day at heavy use. What do I mean with that? Well, the 3G was on all the time, I browsed the internet often and sometimes play some casual games. That’s actually impressive. On average use, I squeezed all of its juice after 3 days. The Cloudfone Thrill 530qx is probably the only quad-core smartphone that can reach that long on one charge. Damn, it’s like there’s a nuclear reactor inside it. Normally, I always complain of the short battery life of smartphones but when I used the Cloudfone Thrill 530qx, I was complaining because I can’t drain its battery. I know, I’m weird. Since this smartphone packs a lot of juice, the Cloudfone Thrill 530qx needs a lot of time before you can fully charge it. I suggest that you charge this phone before you sleep because sometimes, it will took you more than 4 hours to fully charge this phone from 0%.

The first time I saw it, I thought the Cloudfone Thrill 530qx’s battery was removable but no, it isn’t removable. Actually, a lot of people got fooled with that heehee. The battery was sticked to the phone and there are some wires that are actually attached on the battery. It is best not to remove the battery because it will just void your warranty. Anyway, why would you want to replace the battery of the Cloudfone Thrill 530qx? You got a lot of juices inside already.

Inside the Cloudfone Thrill 530qx is Android Jelly Bean. Not bad right? Got no complaints with that. Thankfully, Cloudfone didn’t pre-installed a lot of bloatwares on the phone. So yeah, that’ll give you more storage for your apps and games that you want to install on the internal storage. Cloudfone just announced a new update for the Cloudfone Thrill 530qx but unfortunately, I wasn’t able to try that during my review since I returned the unit before the update was announced. Anyway, the Cloudfone Thrill 530qx didn’t come with surprises on the software side. Let’s just hope that it’ll be updated to Android 4.4 Kitkat because all of us wants to taste that chocolate on our smartphones.

Inside the Cloudfone Thrill 530qx is a MediaTek MT6589m processor and a 1 GB RAM. So what’s up with that “m” on its name? Well, the MT6589m has a lesser performance than the MT6589 and MT6589T but all of them are quad-cores. But don’t worry. The performance gap between the MT6589m and MT6589 aren’t dramatic. The Cloudfone Thrill 530qx got a score of 13607 at Antutu. Most games would work on this smartphone. The quad-core MediaTek processor is powerful enough to run the latest games but not at the highest settings.

The Cloudfone Thrill 530qx doesn’t use the Android stock camera app. It comes with a pre-installed HiCamera app instead which is jam-packed with features. On the HiCamera app, you can do a lot with it and it was very easy to use. The Cloudfone Thrill 530qx has a 12 megapixel camera with dual-led flash doesn’t perform as I expected. It isn’t that bad but I expected too much from the camera. Most lowlight shots that I took wasn’t that good but when I’m in a well-lit environment, the images were pretty good. Here are some shots that I took using the Cloudfone Thrill 530qx.

While here’s a sample video that I took using the Cloudfone Thrill 530qx.

If there’s one thing that’ll set this smartphone apart from other local smartphones, well, it’ll be the battery life. Cloudfone is the only local brand I know that offers a smartphone with this battery life. It might not packed the best display or processor inside it but it surely has one gigantic and monstrous battery life. For those people who wants a smartphone with a long battery life, you might want to put this on the top of your list. You’ll never need a power bank with this phone. The only problem that you’ll have on this smartphone is how you can drain its battery.