Doogee BL5000 Smartphone Review

An exceptional feature of the Doogee BL5000 is its strongly rounded-off case. The screen is not only visibly sloped around the edges, but the edges are also completely cornerless.

Whether or not this will be well received by customers is probably going to be a matter of taste. The "clean lines faction" will call it ugly. Those who hate blocky smartphones will find the design appealing. The feel of the device in the hand is also pleasant on account of the high 210 g weight and the flexible edges. As far as the manufacture of the phone is concerned, the BL5000 presents itself well. There aren't any visible signs of super-wide gaps or any warping that shouldn't actually be there. The case is made from aluminum and the screen is protected by Gorilla Glass 5. There's nothing to complain about here, as long as one doesn't mind smartphones with big screens and heavy batteries. Speaking of which, the one in the BL5000 isn't removable.

As already stated in the introduction, the specifications of the phone in terms of processor and memory are absolutely adequate and offer, in comparison to other purely budget devices, a little bit of extra performance on top. The MT6750 performs somewhat on the level of the Samsung Galaxy Note 3, which was a high-end device at the time of its release. But that was four years ago. In terms of smartphones, that's almost an eternity. Matching the processor, a similarly powerful ARM Mali-T860 MP2 GPU is included. The 4 GB RAM is extremely generous and should not cause any memory issues in the near future. 64 GB of storage space is also no longer flagship standard, as the current iPhone X is shipped with up to 256 GB of hard drive storage - albeit for 10 times the price. Considerable compromises in terms of RAM can be expected in phones that are officially available in Germany (see the LG X power2 with only 16 GB).

In terms of the ports, the device is rather conservative. The charging socket is mounted on its normal position at the bottom of the phone as a Micro-USB port and offers, in addition to OTG charging, charging capabilities for other devices.

The headphone jack can be found opposite on the top side of the phone. The left side houses the SIM-card tray, and optionally an SD card. The disc can be ejected with the help of the enclosed SIM device. The volume controls and the on/off switch are located opposite.

The BL5000 is only equipped with 802.11 n Wi-Fi that nevertheless provides decent data transfer speeds. Its competition manages in some cases to only reach half of that. Only the Blackview P2 achieves similar results. These speeds are completely adequate for surfing the web, as Internet line speeds are generally not any faster. However, faster transfer speeds can be advantageous for exchanging data over Wi-Fi. More expensive smartphones are nowadays reliant on the AC Wi-Fi standard.

In terms of LTE connectivity, the BL5000 supports all the important LTE bands (800 MHz, 1800 MHz and 2600 MHz).

In terms of the device's main function, there's nothing to complain about. The unmodified standard telephone app from Android is in use. Volume and audio quality were convincing. Both conversation partners were able to understand each other well.

Headphones are not provided.

The ColorChecker photos confirm the mild impressions made by the cameras thus far. It can clearly be seen in our test images that the camera has problems with visual acuity when zooming. This is a little confusing in comparison to the photos above, as there are also images showing that the camera is capable of capturing sharp images quite well. But it is somewhat up to chance whether or not the intended area can be successfully focused upon. As is evident in our test charts, it was clearly not successful in this case.

The color reproduction is also not convincing. There is hardly a single color that has been captured accurately, and a few colors have deviated considerably from their source.

The browser benchmarks confirm the impressions made by the other tests. The Doogee device is easily able to match the performance of its competitors. Subjectively, the provided browser runs fluidly and shows no signs of hanging when rendering images.

In terms of hard-drive speed, the Doogee paints a familiar picture. It's up there at the top but is eclipsed by a "random" device. In this case, that's the Oukitel, which has otherwise lagged behind, albeit ever so slightly. The numbers game reveals that the manufacturer did not pick the absolute cheapest storage chips. The hard drive should contribute to the smartphone's balanced performance.

However, we were unable to test the SD-card slot, as the Doogee BL5000 did not recognize our reference card. SDXC cards are presumably not supported. When buying additional storage for your device, you should therefore make sure that the chosen product is an SDHC card.

The speaker grill on the bottom side of the phone covers a loudspeaker on the right and a microphone on the left. Doogee offers somewhat better audio quality in comparison to other budget smartphones. The volume is loud enough to fill a small room with a normal spectrum of sounds. The bass is lacking, as to be expected. A headset is not provided by the manufacturer. Our test with high-end headphones provided better audio output, but studio quality sounds should not be expected from the headphone jack.

In terms of value for money, the Doogee BL5000 is also, in this regard, of above-average quality.

Energy management has traditionally been a weakness of Chinese smartphones. The Doogee BL5000's scores are surprisingly good when under load, but this makes them all the worse when measured on standby. When compared to the somewhat lower-specced LG X power2, the BL5000 uses almost twice the power. Something here seems to be fundamentally wrong. It's rather rare to see such extreme scores when comparing idle power consumption to that under load. The rule of thumb is: if the idle scores are bad, then they are bad under load, too. The Doogee breaks this rule.

The somewhat contradictory scores in terms of power consumption are also reflected in the battery life. Although the device manages to come first in our Wi-Fi test among our competition devices (and third of all devices in our data bank!), the battery performance is rather poor in our Reader's Test. The LG X power2 manages to have twice the runtime with a somewhat smaller battery. What a shame! But some devices are even worse, as the Oukitel K600 Plus proves, despite it having the largest battery.

The reason for this poor performance is likely the high minimum brightness, which draws a decent amount of power away from the battery.