Archive for October 31st, 2016

Archos Diamond Selfie Review

With superior build quality the Archos Diamond Selfie is marred by a couple of little concerns, however, these can easily be ironed out by a software update. It has to be said that once you pick up the Archos diamond selfie it’s difficult not to fall in love with it. The all metal surround and the black glass really give off a real, premium feel. Certainly there is a lot of weight and heft to the device, however, you will quickly notice just how slippery the device is, especially on a cold day.

The Archos Diamond Selfie has some of the best specs we have seen in a phone from Archos and that are very competitive for the price bracket too.

• Display – 5.50-inch 1920 x 1080 (FHD) IPS, Full lamination
• Processor – Qualcomm MSM8937, Octa-core Cortex-A53 1.4 GHz
• Front Camera – 8-megapixel
• Resolution – 1080×1920 pixels
• RAM – 4GB DDR3
• OS – Android 6.0
• Storage – 64GB + Micro SD card, up to 128GB
• Rear Camera – 16-megapixel
• Battery Capacity – 3000mAh Li-ion, Quick Charge

Looking around the device on the top there are two slits for the antennas and a 3.5-millimetre headphone jack.

On the right-hand side lies a volume rocker the power button and another antenna slit.

At the bottom are some fool speaker grills, that we will get back to those later, a microphone hole and a micro USB charger slot. Again some antenna slits.

On the left-hand side is only has an indentation for the micro SD and SIM card tray. This is where we come to one of the first problems with the phone. This tray is not flush with the device you can feel it move ever so slightly every time you run your finger over it. Your fingernail will stop at the slight protrusion at the hole for the sim ejector tool. The tray itself fits two cards, a microSD or Micro SIM in one and a Nano SIM in the other.

The back is entirely black glass and finger print city. At the top are the camera and the LED flash. Midway down there is a fingerprint reader and towards the bottom a whole for the speaker. Yes, the speaker is on the back of the device despite the two grills either side of the micro USB connector.

The screen is almost perfect, it’s beautiful, bright, responsive, and efficient. Archos have added an extra button to the screen buttons toward the bottom of the screen. This button removes the onscreen buttons to maximise the screen resolution.

The battery life of the device is quite impressive. Having used it for a few days as my main device I noticed that I was finishing the day with around 40% left, perhaps I don’t have as many apps installed on this as I do with my Nexus 6P, however, having it finish the day with a good bit more than I usually have, is quite impressive.

Android itself runs perfectly smoothly on this device there is very little in the way of additions from Archos. Aside from a couple of applications that they have added, that are not required to be installed during the initial setup. However, there has been a button added to the interface of the Task Manager. A small, ugly button, off centre, to speed up your device the closes all of the applications.

As it turns out these grills at the bottom are purely cosmetic, the speaker is situated on the back of the device. Whilst this is hardly a problem, or a flaw, it just opens a little concern as to why there would be grills at the bottom, did the device have to be reworked at a later stage in development for reason?

As this phone is called a Selfie, you would expect there to be an impressive experience with the photos front facing camera. In truth the camera works well, however, the added features in the beautification mode mean that camera’s on-screen preview run at around 15 frames per second, and in low-level light, the preview is around 2 frames per second. I can only hope this device has an early version of the selfie software and retail will see an update.

Flip the camera round the to the rear camera and you have 120 frames per seconds on the preview and it looks gorgeously smooth, the exact opposite of the front facing camera.

The shots are crisp and attractive. There is little in the way of compression, and honestly, this camera turns out to be one of the better cameras on the marker for the money, Archos have done some great work here. As you can see from the gallery below the colour mix is impressive and the clarity is never questionable.

So what is wrong with the Archos Diamond Selfie? Not that much, to be entirely honest. The phone is retailing for around £200 and what you are getting is amazing. Certainly, you can notice where some of the cutbacks have been made. The lack of precision on the sim card tray, no support for the 5Ghz wifi spectrum, the weight. However, what it does have it is hard to find in that price range, a decent stills camera, a beautiful screen, 64gb of expandable storage and a speedy performance. I really like this phone and I am prepared to admit that I honestly wondered why I paid more than double for a Nexus 6P.