OTTO Ruble R5 Review: A Good Alternative to Feature Phone!

If you have slightly more than 6 thousand rupees to spend on a smartphone then which phone will you buy? Well answer to such questions, we have a phone from Otto, the Otto Ruble R5 with Android Go priced at Rs. 6396.

This is a brief review of Otto Ruble R5. I’ll go through its build quality, display, performance, software, battery, and overall experience.

OTTO Ruble R5 Review

Build Quality

So as always let’s start with the build quality. If you look at this phone from the back, it looks quite cute and standard. The camera set up on the back is smart. They’ve put the flash and primary sensor on the same module so that it can look like a dual camera setup.

Talking about the back, it’s not a glossy finish and its made up of plastic so the fingerprint and smudges won’t show that easily. The phone feels sturdy, chunky and well built. But from the front, this phone looks pretty bland. We have large bezels and chin. And let’s just say the phone looks quite good from the back but pretty bland from the front.

They could have easily added capacitive buttons on the chin as they did on the Otto CRO3 but we just get on-screen navigation keys. Another thing I noticed is Otto phones have their USB charging port on top alongside the 3.5mm headphone jack. The speaker is placed on the back, which is obviously a bad choice because the sound is naturally moving away from you. The back is removable and once you remove it, you’ll get access to two card slots, where one of the slots can also handle a micro SD.

But one thing I really do not about this phone is its buttons. You won’t even feel like you’re clicking the buttons. They are soft and feel mushy. They could have done better here.

Display

The Otto Ruble R5 has a 5.0-inch FWVGA display with a screen resolution of 1132×540. For the price tag, this display is okayish. I mean it’s really hard to judge a phone with this price tag. The display is poor, the colors are pretty neutral and look ok, but the viewing angle is not that good. Well, this is what you get for 6000 Rs. It cannot get much better.

Hardware

So how does a phone that costs 6,396 perform? Well, you don’t even have to guess. It uses Spreatrum SC773E Soc with 512MB RAM, a quad-core CPU, and Mali T820 GPU. So, yeah you can use facebook lite and all of the apps with lite versions like Maps Go and Youtube Go.

Then you can obviously do the basics. The phone calls, messaging and etc. But the overall app experience is not smooth. You will find it sluggish even when jumping from YouTube go to the home screen or even when typing a locations name on Maps Go.

Camera

On the back, the Ruble R5 has a 5MP main camera and on the front, it has a 2MP selfie camera. How do the pictures turn out? Obviously not good if you were expecting to get good photos. The photos will have noise even during daylight and indoor photos will have plenty of noise.

But this is as expected. You cannot expect a phone at this price tag to have a good camera. It’s there so that you can just capture some important stuff. Maybe some special moments or some important documents.

Software

This thing runs on Android go. To be specific, it runs on Android 8.1 And the software is pretty barebone. You get simple Android Go UI, simple drop-down notification, app drawer. Android GO itself is a lite and slow OS. So I cannot really complain about the sluggishness of this OS.

They haven’t changed anything on the OS, but they could have certainly done some refinement. And, I’m saying this because this thing feels slow even when you’re opening dialer or the messaging app. But this fault could solely be blamed on the hardware as it has just 512MB RAM.

Battery

So this thing has 2000 mAh battery and at best it’s a one-day battery. It will not even last a single day on average usage. You will definitely need to charge it before you reach home if you are an average user.

Talking about charging time. It’s hectic. I would assume 2000 mah battery phone to be charged quite quick even with a slow charger. But it took me 174 minutes to charge this thing from 0 to 100. That equals to 2.9 hours, so yes it has a very slow charging speed.

Overall

OTTO is clear about their target audience. Ruble R5 is for someone who wants to upgrade from their bar phone, or for someone who is looking for their first phone, or for someone who can’t afford a dime more than 7K. And for the price, it is a decent phone. But of course, you could always add some cash to get a better phone.