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Meet the $90 Android phone with bigger battery than iPhone 6s

Published Nov 18th, 2015 5:43PM EST
World's Cheapest Android Phones UMi ROME

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Hardware specs certainly aren’t everything but it’s still incredibly impressive how some Chinese vendors are able to sell devices with fairly high-end hardware at dirt-cheap prices. The latest example comes to us via GizChina, which informs us that there’s a new device out there called the UMi Rome that features a bigger battery and more RAM than the iPhone 6s and costs a mere $90.

RELATED: Walmart is selling a $10 Android phone with better specs than iPhone 6s

All told, the UMi Rome comes with a 5.5-inch display with a resolution of 720 x  1,280 pixels, an octa-core Mediatek MT6753 chipset, 3GB of RAM and a 2,500mAh battery. Its base storage starts at just 16GB but it also has support for 128GB microSD cards. From a design perspective, the UMi Rome seems to, ahem, borrow liberally from Samsung’s Galaxy S6 series of phones.

Does this mean that you should buy this $90 device over more expensive smartphones such as the iPhone 6s or the Nexus 6P? Of course not — hardware specs alone don’t account for things like build quality, how well the software plays with the hardware, or the overall user experience. Plus, there are already very inexpensive Android phones out there such as the Moto G and the OnePlus X that we know deliver a quality experience for the price.

But it is nonetheless interesting to see just how low Chinese Android vendors can go when it comes to pricing and it also suggests that maybe Apple could be a little more generous with its base storage option when it releases the iPhone 7 next year… or so we hope…

Brad Reed
Brad Reed Staff Writer

Brad Reed has written about technology for over eight years at BGR.com and Network World. Prior to that, he wrote freelance stories for political publications such as AlterNet and the American Prospect. He has a Master's Degree in Business and Economics Journalism from Boston University.