Bold, unusual design; Tough plastic build; CyanogenMod is highly tweakable
Slow camera; Occasionally slow performance; Very poor standby stamina
"It's the Apple of China", "this one is a real Apple-killer", "Apple must be quaking in its boots".
Apple gets roped into many conversations in which it has only cursory relevance but talk about the Obi Worldphone MV1 and it's almost impossible not to invoke the big A.
Obi Worldphone is a company founded by ex-Apple CEO John Sculley, the man who once fired Steve Jobs, and he appears to be out for a slice of the Apple pie.
However, the two companies are not remotely aiming for the same audience. Apple's products are more accessible than they used to be, but nothing in its line-up gets close to the £119 Obi Worldphone MV1. This is a SIM-free bargain buyer's phone and it certainly gets you something different.
Design
The MV1's first impression is, well, interesting. Coming across a little like Homer Simpson's bubble car, the Obi Worldphone MV1 looks like two phones pushed together. The screen and back cover draw a single curvy outline of a phone, but the actual frame extends out to form a flat metal top that looks like part of another phone entirely.
If you can swallow the look, there are some things to admire about the Obi Worldphone MV1 design. It's surprisingly sturdy, with a plastic shell that feels hard enough to drive nails into a wall. The phone has a thin removable battery cover like most budget phones, but it doesn't form a key part of the exoskeleton structure. It just sits on the back.
While the Obi Worldphone MV1 may earn you a few quizzical glances from friends, you could easily persuade most people it cost far more than £120. It helps, of course, that no-one you know has heard of Obi Worldphone and that its logo looks like one of an upscale Swedish interior designer.
Obi Worldphone's promise to marry "style and substance" isn’t empty, either. The MV1 has 16GB storage, which is generous at the price, and the phone features a microSD slot and two SIMs slots.
Display
The screen is where you see the style/substance priorities clash heads. The Obi Worldphone MV1 has a very unusual 'floating' screen, which is what makes this look like one phone growing out of another.
Its specs and quality are fairly decent for the price, though. Its 5-inch 720p IPS LCD screen, is similar to what is used in the 2015 Moto G and it's reasonably sharp, making it bright enough to use outdoors.
There are many 5-inch 720p phones available at this point, though, and the Obi Worldphone MV1 display has a red colour skew that makes it look less natural than most. Colour is much better in the £75 Vodafone Smart Prime 7, for example.
To focus too much on the tech nitty-gritty is to miss the point of the Obi Worldphone MV1. It's a very different phone and it needs this angle in the UK because while Obi Worldphone claims it has found a gap in the market, there are many decent-looking £100 to £150 phones available here.
Software
Another example of Obi Worldphone embracing its unusual side is its use of CyanogenMod. While not the underground 'scene' custom Android UI it used to be, CyanogenMod is still wilfully different. It has a look all of its own, and rejects the pretty-but-restrictive direction the last few generations of Android have adopted.
For example, you can tweak home screens so that they fit in 36 app icons rather than the usual 16. It's out to provide the flexibility Android used to have alongside a modern look and feel. The highlight of this is the apps menu, which is a fast-moving vertical scroll whose alphabet markers make it even easier to navigate than that of Android Marshmallow.
There's a real appeal here for those who want a phone quite unlike the Samsungs and iPhones, and the somewhat-diminishing Sonys.
Performance and Spec
This advantage doesn't wallpaper-paste over everything, of course. For one, the Obi Worldphone MV1 is not a powerful phone. Like a Nissan Figaro, its striking looks attract attention away from its piddly engine.
The phone has a Snapdragon 212 CPU, a bottom-rung Qualcomm chipset with four cores of the lowly and dated Cortex-A7 breed. Its performance is acceptable, and just that. There's some lag at times, new app loads are relatively slow, but the MV1 is not a chore to use. This may be down to the phone's use of 2GB RAM rather than 1GB.
Its issue is that there are far more capable phones at the price. The Wileyfox Swift is the obvious one to mention. It is also an oddball that uses the CyanogenMod software, is available for £120 and has a more powerful Snapdragon 410 chipset, making it faster.
Camera
A little bit of occasional slow-down may be easy to accept in a cheap phone, but a sloth-like camera is not. The Obi Worldphone MV1 has a low-end camera setup, with an 8MP rear camera and a 2MP one on the front - but it's the slow shooting speed that annoyed us.
Shutter lag means you're left actively waiting until you can take another shot, and the HDR mode is interminably slow. It takes the fun out of using a phone camera. The CyanogenMod camera app is also over-designed, using a gesture system to flick between modes where other phone-makers reverted to a much simpler style years ago.
Actual image quality is fine for an 8MP camera, and it doesn't have any huge issues with overexposure, but as with the processor we're right at the price border that unlocks better hardware. Small-brand 13MP phones exist at a similar price, and most phones are faster to shoot. The camera is also a little inconsistent, with white balance and exposure changing significantly from shot to shot.
A few basics in the Obi Worldphone MV1 feel a little neglected. This is nothing like the Moto G line, a series of phones whose whole remit is to provide as solid an experience as possible in the areas that matter. Battery life suffers in this respect too.
The MV1 has a totally standard 2500mAh battery, the same rough size used in all reputable phones of this size and budget. However, it's terrible at holding onto its charge on standby meaning if it's not put on charge overnight, it'll almost certainly be dead by morning after a solid day’s use.
It seems to be a software issue that may be solved with an update, but like the poor camera performance, is indicative of a lack of attention to detail in places that really matter.
Verdict
The Obi Worldphone MV1 is a super-affordable phone with an interesting hook - that it comes from a company set up by John Sculley. However, Sculley isn't Steve Jobs and he isn't Jonathan Ive.
More attention seems to have been paid to its bizarre design and the misguided image of it as some kind of budget saviour than some of the smartphone essentials that matter much more to most. A year or two ago the Obi Worldphone MV1 would have been a remarkable achievement, but thanks to its just-passable performance and very slow camera, there are much better phones available for around £120.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
