Bluboo announces Xtouch smartphone for $179

The Bluboo Xtouch was teased earlier this month for its relatively high-end hardware with the promise of an entry-level price. Today, the Chinese manufacturer is launching the Xtouch for just below $180.

Bluboo is making bold claims for its latest 5-inch smartphone including an NTSC coverage of 95 percent, 450 nit brightness, 1000:1 contrast ratio, 14-hour WLAN rutime, and 0.3 second fingerprint scanner. The design itself is also quite thin at 5.5 mm compared to 7.1 mm of the iPhone 6S with similar nano-molding and "seamless metal body". Based on the official renders, the smartphone does indeed exhibit a kind of quality reserved for costlier flagship smartphones.

The wild card that could make or break the phone is its MediaTek MT6753 SoC and Mali-T720 GPU. The processor was announced in March of this year for mid-range smartphones, so it remains to be seen how well this chip can run a 1080p display. The Xtouch will be one of the first few smartphones to sport the SoC.

Bluboo has yet to announce prices for the higher-end Xtouch X500 Pro, which includes 4 GB RAM instead of 3 GB and a faster MediaTek MT6795 Helio X10 SoC instead of the MT6753. The Pro model also boasts a much more powerful 20.7 MP rear camera compared to "just" 13 MP on the X500 and a whopping 64 GB eMMC.

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