Oukitel C50 review: It's a cheap and cheerful 5G phone with a 5,150mAh battery

You may remember Oukitel as one of the brands we've tested rugged phones for, but they also make non rugged phones (as well[1] as tablets[2]), most sit in the lower-end segment, however the C50 we are reviewing today does include 5G connectivity.

First up, let's dive into the specs:

One thing that might immediately put you off is the price, however, that's just the manufacturers recommended retail pricing! When you go to the official site, you will quickly see that the purchase price is already 80% off at $109.95, which I can already tell you is a lot more realistic for what we are getting for that money. That places it on the lower end of the pricing ladder that supports 5G. I've put the full bands it supports in a table below.

The colors offered on the product page along with the option for a U.S., EU, or U.K. charger in the box are Blue, Grey, and Green. Ours is the Blue variant.

As you can see, this phones does not even support American bands (yet) Oukitel says on its official store page at Aliexpress:

Note: The C50 model is not yet available in an American version, so it cannot use SIM cards in the Americas and can only connect via WiFi. Production plans are underway, so stay tuned!

We're not getting flagship features here in terms of a display or processor power. There's ample RAM and storage, and that storage can even be expanded with an SD card on this model.

Day 1

The first thing anyone will notice when unboxing it is the weight. At just 208g, it is quite light. Switching between this and my Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra made me wonder why my own phone was so much heavier at 270g but maybe that's down to the extra tech included within it.

One thing I found a bit comical from the specifications, is that this phone is supposedly rated to be able to be dropped "16 times" from a height of 0.8 meters. Maybe on to a cushion! I am almost certain this was accidentally left in from a previous template for a rugged phone or something (which has the same exact specification). It is made from plastic, with Gorilla Glass 5 around the front. I've seen plenty of shattered Gorilla Glass protected phones. In any case, I did not bother with a drop test of this cheap and cheerful phone, in case you were wondering. However, there is also a clear TPU case shipped with the C50, and it also came with a preinstalled screen protector.

I made a few calls on it, and the call quality was excellent, but that's the minimum you should expect from any phone. The mono speaker was also loud enough when I switched the phone to hands-free speaker mode.

Design

There's not much to write home about the design, it is a typical candybar shape with a triple camera hump housing on the top left rear that you will find on many smartphones. The housing feels plastic as well, although the back is slightly textured and should prevent it from slipping, the sides are completely smooth, so it ends up feeling like it will slip out of my hand without the TPU case.

On the rear, the camera array consists of a 50 MP main camera, along with two 0.08 MP unspecified cameras. To the right of the top camera is an LED flash. As I mentioned before, the back has a plastic feel to it, with a textured finish. The one thing it has going for it, its that it feels good in the hand with the TPU case, because it also isn't very heavy.

On the right side of the phone, you will find two volume buttons and a power key that doubles as a fingerprint sensor. The keys have a good height and are easily detected by feel. All of those buttons are completely smooth.

On the left, you'll find the SIM card tray with a pinhole in order to access it. The SIM tray can hold a nano SIM and TF Card, or nano + nano for a dual SIM option.

On the bottom, you'll a 3.5mm Headphone Jack port, and a USB Type C charger port for the included 1 m USB Type C-to-USB Type C cable and 10 W charger. To the left of the USB port is a mic hole, and to the right there is the single speaker grill.

The top of the C50 is mostly smooth except for a single pin hole which looks like another mic.

On the front of the device above the display, you'll find the 5 MP front-facing camera. There is no notification LED, which is a bit of a letdown, since we have yet another phone with an IPS LCD screen that natively does not support an Always on Display, so having a notification LED would have been a good trade-off. In addition, the display is unprotected other than for Gorilla Glass 5 and the pre-installed screen protector, so when it is lying face down, it is lying directly on the display itself.

The C50 includes a 6.8-inch screen, and is only 9.2 mm in thickness. That weight also feels like it is distributed evenly across the phone, the camera hump adds a few millimeters when the phone is lying on a flat surface.

Display

The 6.8" FHD+ display has a 720 x 1600 screen resolution, with a 258 PPI pixel density, a 20:9 aspect ratio, and Corning Gorilla Glass 5 protection. Oukitel claims the display has a 400-nit peak brightness. It certainly showed as I found it really difficult to view the screen in the sunlight. It was perfectly fine when I was shooting pictures indoors or in the shadows.

It's not fancy by any means, but I don't plan to consume media at 4K HDR anyway. The display is passable. As with most smartphones with a pinhole or teardrop camera, media such as YouTube defaults to a 16:9 aspect ratio which puts black bars on the left and right of the video, but you can pinch out to fill the screen if you want, personally I find it distracting to stretch the media over the default values.

Cameras

As I have said in previous smartphone reviews I've done, I am no camera buff. I'm a point-and-shoot kind of guy, but it is clear to me that smartphone makers seem to want to concentrate a hell of a lot on camera quality, sometimes at the expense of other features, and on paper at least, here is also no exception. On the rear, we have a 50 MP rear shooter with an F/1.8 ± 5% aperture and 77° FOV made by GalaxyCore. There's also two 0.08 MP unspecified cameras on the back making up the triple array. I have asked my contact for what purpose they serve

Unfortunately, there's no optical image stabilization (OIS), which is a common omission on cheaper phones. There's also no PDAF (phase detection auto focus), which is a high-speed automatic focus technology, and it shows as you'll see in some of my examples below.

Google gets around the lack of OIS on its Pixel phones by using the gyroscope for stabilization, but if this tech is included here, it isn't disclosed.

Gallery: Oukitel C50 Main Camera daylight

As you can see in the above photos, It was a bit cloudy with the sun sometimes coming through, scene images came out rather well, except when shooting towards anything overcast with shadow, which resulted in a far darker picture. Closeups, as I have seen in other Oukitel, Blackview or Doogee rugged phones, not only seemed to oversaturate the colors a bit, but thanks to lack of PDAF most closeups also resulted in an out-of-focus picture. I also tried to take a picture of our main church using the zoom functionality, and that came out pretty badly.

Some photos were difficult to take because even with the adaptive display outside, at full brightness, still made it hard to see what I was shooting. I'd say the camera only just passes at taking scene photos in a well lit situation. No other examples came out well

Gallery: Oukitel C50 Main Camera Nighttime

At a certain moment, I gave up taking pictures outside, not only could I not see what I was taking a picture of on the display unless it was brightly lit, it was also incredibly hard to take any pictures in focus. I dumped a few that I took which ended up being trails of lights, probably because I moved a bit while taking the shot, even so I did not have this issue in the daytime.

Software

The C50 ships with Android 14 with the April 2024 security update, which is only a few months old. However, in terms of software updates and support. You can expect a security update maybe once every quarter, and a warranty that lasts for one year.

The phone comes with a completely stock experience, with Android's own Quickstep home launcher. Oukitel does not ship their own flavor of launcher in this phone like it does with all the rugged phones.

There is no User-defined Side Key in this phone, and the display settings only let you switch between Auto, 90Hz, or 60Hz. the Auto setting even lets you "force" 90Hz or 60Hz, whatever that means over the other settings in the previous settings page.

Performance and Battery Life

The phone offers charging through the wall charger at 10W and no wireless option, and with an 5,150 mAh battery. Oukitel claims that it takes three hours to fully charge it at 10W.

The official web page claims 655 hours (27.7 days) on standby, 22.6 hours of call time, 17.4 hours of music, 7.2 hours of gaming or streaming, and 6.3 hours of video playback, but I haven't had this phone long enough to check.

For those who love benchmarks, there are a few below. I started off with GFXBench which tests the GPU.

It's good to see it can hold its own against... quite old competition such as the 2015 released NVIDIA Shield Tablet, or the 2016 Samsung Galaxy S7. It's okay for light gaming, that's about it.

Next up, I ran Geekbench, which returned a score of 679, which came in 51 points lower compared to the Oukitel WP27 with a Helio G99 SoC in Single-Core, and 130 points lower at 1906 (compared to 2036) for Multi-Core. These CPUs continue to remain in the bottom area of the benchmarks.

Last but not least, the AnTuTu benchmark tests, came in at 375,592 points, which is 31352 points lower than the Oukitel WP27. I wasn't able to see how it ranks in comparison to other phones, because AnTuTu has removed that stat from the benchmark app.

The Oukitel C50 includes the MediaTek Dimensity 6100+, which is an 8-core chipset that was announced in July 2023 and is manufactured using a 6-nanometer process technology. It is comparable to the Qualcomm Snapdragon 695 5G, although it does not best it in any way.

Conclusion

This phone isn't going to break the bank at the (as of writing) discounted price of $109.95, which is the cheapest 5G phone I have tested so far. However, for that cost, you can only expect a year of support, plus only around four Android security updates in that year.

For someone on a budget this phone will get you through the day, and as long as you take photos during the day you'll be happy with the outcome. It has a few things going for it, such as the 5,150mAh battery, 5G support, and a 90Hz display.

The Oukitel C50 is available from today, June 17, and a U.S. version will become available at an as yet undisclosed later date.