Hands-on with Hisense’s flagship phone C1: Are phones made by a major TV manufacturer any good?

As smartphones evolve and become more sophisticated, the gap in daily experience between different hardware configurations is getting smaller and smaller, causing the industry to focus more on more segmented projects.

VoLTE technology can be regarded as a new focus for major mobile phone manufacturers as they enter the 4G era. Surprisingly, while there are only a handful of products that support VoLTE today, TV giant Hisense unexpectedly released a flagship smartphone C1 that supports VoLTE at the end of 2015.

Okay, regardless of whether you can use VoLTE or not, let’s first take a look at the quality of this flagship smartphone from Hisense.

This time we got the full network version of Hisense C1. The gold color scheme and the three-stage front design commonly seen in the industry make the overall design of the product look slightly familiar. Some inevitable openings on the top of the front are arranged to form a "Dabai" appearance similar to LeTV mobile phones, but this "Dabai" glasses look a little open.

The back of the machine is completely golden and also adopts a three-section structure. The camera part is more prominent, and the conspicuous Hisense Logo is the only text logo on the surface of Hisense C1.

The black borders of Hisense C1's screen extend to the left and right ends. It is not borderless but can be called the recently popular "ID borderless". The default lock screen wallpaper also fits this idea well. The width of the 5.5-inch screen machine is well controlled when held in the hand.

The 5.5-inch large screen of Hisense C1 has a resolution of only 720P, which is only at the level of Samsung Galaxy Note2 three years ago. However, the actual viewing experience is not unacceptable. The AMOLED material makes the large number of black elements in the interface appear very pure.

Having a long chin but still having virtual buttons on the screen may make many consumers hesitant about Hisense C1. In fact, this native operating logic of Google Android will become very efficient after getting used to it, and it should not have any problems in China. After all, the best-selling Huawei also does this.

Hisense C1 adopts metal one-piece molding technology, and the thickness of the whole machine is only 5.73mm, which looks extremely amazing. In terms of the arrangement of the side openings, the 3.5mm headphone, MicroUSB and speaker holes are all placed at the bottom, with delicate workmanship. Of course, being thin also has its disadvantages. The 2300mAh built-in battery is destined to make the product's battery life not have much outstanding performance.

If Apple can't make the camera flat on a 7mm body, then it makes sense that Hisense can't make the camera flat on a body less than 6mm.

In terms of system, Hisense C1 is equipped with the VISION 3 interface customized based on Android 5.1. For ordinary consumers, it can be roughly regarded as an "icon modified version" of domestic systems such as MIUI. It does not have many distinctive features, but it is indeed more approachable than native Android.

From the settings interface, we can see that although Hisense C1 uses the mainstream configuration of 2G+16G memory combination, the processor model is only Snapdragon 410. Fortunately, in the current world of smartphones, everyone has excess performance, and with acceptable system optimization, there is no noticeable abnormality in daily applications.

A separate large icon interface is opened on the left side of the main interface, which is a unique feature of the Hisense C1 interface that is worth mentioning. However, this is not an information aggregation section, but a quick operation option of large icons, such as alarm clock and weather, which is a bit like the interface of a mobile phone for the elderly.

The default virtual buttons of Hisense C1 have been modified compared to native Android, but they are not easy to use. It is a bit unbelievable that the voice recognition button, which is rarely used in reality, can occupy a position in the low column. If you are not careful, a robot will start talking to you when you call out the multitasking interface.

The Hisense C1, which is equipped with a 1300W pixel PDAF central motor phase focus main camera, is still horizontally stable in the photo imaging stage, but the interface design lags behind. Like the Apple iPhone, the appearance of the manual exposure slider bar in the camera interface is very exciting, but this slider can only be adjusted horizontally. Even if the global gravity sensor is turned on, it is still blocking the middle of the screen, which is not very convenient to use.

From the perspective of a major TV manufacturer, Hisense C1 can be seen as a good smartphone product, especially the outstanding metal + ultra-thin design, which will undoubtedly leave a deep first impression on most consumers.

However, as a domestic mobile phone priced at 2,000 yuan, the performance of Hisense C1 is far from outstanding. The hardware configuration is not mainstream enough, the system UI needs to be optimized, and there are no product bonus items such as fingerprint recognition, which are now popular on thousand-yuan phones. It is hard to say how much sales it can achieve in the fiercely competitive domestic mobile phone market.

But then again, not every mobile phone manufacturer has a strong TV product line to support it. For the Hisense C1, which has a high appearance score, bundling it with a Hisense TV seems to be a smart way to create sparks with consumers .

As a winner of Toutiao's Qingyun Plan and Baijiahao's Bai+ Plan, the 2019 Baidu Digital Author of the Year, the Baijiahao's Most Popular Author in the Technology Field, the 2019 Sogou Technology and Culture Author, and the 2021 Baijiahao Quarterly Influential Creator, he has won many awards, including the 2013 Sohu Best Industry Media Person, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Beijing Third Place, the 2015 Guangmang Experience Award, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Finals Third Place, and the 2018 Baidu Dynamic Annual Powerful Celebrity.