The Blackview A9 Pro is one of the many budget devices to come out of Blackview recently; and with budget devices like these, you can expect a metal body and entry level performance for a low price.
The A9 Pro looks pretty unremarkable in many respects. Specifications are nothing special, with a varied assortment of other phones boasting almost the exact same specifications. The price of this phone doesn’t do much to excite either, with more powerful phones to be had for $10-15 more. It does boast a dual camera setup and a USB-C port which are uncommon in this price range, but will these two features be enough to push this device ahead of the pack? Let’s find out.
A budget blackview
Processor | MTk6737 Quad Core |
Display | 5.0” 1280×720 IPS LCD |
RAM | 2GB |
Storage | 16GB eMMC |
Operating System | Android 7.0 Nougat |
Cameras | 8MP/0.3MP dual Camera, 2MP front |
Battery | 3000mAh |
Physical Dimensions | 175g, 14.36 x 7.24 x 0.92 cm |
Big thanks to Blackview for providing this review unit. You can buy one here.
Fine build quality
The 3000mAh battery struggles to keep up with a full day of heavy use, which is to be expected for a typical battery size like this. Nevertheless, I obtained close to 4 hours of screen on time over a 16 hour day which is respectable and falling short of good. This use consisted of web browsing, quite a bit of Facebook, texting, and some Youtube. Definitely not the heaviest use, and by the time 10pm rolled around, I was at 6%. Heavy users will struggle greatly to get through a day without a charger while medium and light users will find the battery life sufficient.
Average battery
The phone games surprisingly well, with the MTK6737 pushing games quite easily on the 720p screen. I could play even the most intense games without any lag, quite an accomplishment on a budget phone like this.
The fingerprint sensor here is fairly accurate but very slow. There were delays between 1 second to 3 seconds until the screen turned on, the fingerprint sensor is definitely slow.
Ensure this phone works in your specific carrier before you make a purchase. I was able to obtain 4G and speeds on 4G are decent but not great. WiFi range is a little short, 3 storeys up from my router and speeds slow down to a crawl. Bluetooth does work fine, and GPS is fairly inaccurate as well, jumping around a great deal.
The primary rear camera takes barely average pictures in good lighting conditions. The 8MP camera struggles to capture sufficient detail, but at least colours here are reproduced quite nicely. The already average photo quality takes a steep dive as light becomes less abundant, with noise and grain multiplied almost exponentially. The secondary rear camera doesn’t help either, it adds a faux bokeh effect to the photo, but the photo quality wasn’t good in the first place.
Video quality performs quite poorly, capturing blurry footage that in some cases is almost unuseable, even in the best lighting conditions.
Weak Camera
Blackview A9 Pro Camera Gallery
Blackview has done an OK job in almost all areas of this budget phone with one glaring omission, the camera. The quality of the photo and video is poor enough that I would strongly hesitate recommending this phone. While the camera quality is the major failing of this device, the A9 Pro is not without its qualities. The combination of metal frame and rubber back is pleasant, and the display is quite lively. Gaming performance is surprisingly good as well.
The Blackview A9 Pro can be had for about $100, which is cheap, but if you can afford to spend an extra $25, I would recommend to you the Redmi 4A, which is a much better all round phone than this.
You can purchase the A9 Pro for around the $100 mark here.
hmmm…
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