A mini Lingwin N1 mobile phone review

If you avoided buying the AIEK C6 in the last mini review, you might have spotted the Lingwin N1 at around the same price range.

It’s this thing: http://lingwin.hk/en/product/n1

So here’s another mini review for another mini phone.

The essentials:
Does it work? Yes! It’s 2G only, so make sure your provider has 2G. This one has 2 sim slots for any people who have a need for 2 sim slots, and a micro SD slot. It doesn’t look like a micro SD slot. It looks a bit like a third sim slot, but it will take and use a micro SD.

The good:
A useable screen size, with fairly easy to navigate menus and options. It’s not a stellar battery life, but it will definitely last longer than a smart phone. The keypad is back lit and easy to read even in bad light. It’s light and small. You can actually flip between upper and lower case, so text entry is possible, although again it lacks any kind of T9 or predictive text.

The bad:
The camera is pointless. I know you think you’ve used bad digital cameras before, but this one is worse. I’ve not managed to get a single clear image. The exposure is horribly off and can’t cope with bright lights or any kind of darkness. Everything looks like a drunk water colour impressionist with partial blindness made a quick sketch. No really. It is that bad. There is no point using the camera on this phone.
The LED light function is roughly equivalent to holding a match. Forget using it as a flash for the camera. Worry more about not being able to light your feet on a dark path. Feeble is an understatement.
Without a micro SD card, this thing comes with a whopping 64Kb of memory. That’s not a typo. Kilobytes. Sadly, about 30 of those are used already, leaving you with about 30Kb of memory.
So that pointless blur you just took with the camera? It can’t save it anywhere anyway.
With a micro SD in place, things improve .. slightly. You can now take pointless blurry pictures, and slowly fill the card with MP3’s. Did I say slow? It’s about 500Kb/s average upload speed. It will take you about 35 minutes to upload 1 GB of music to the phone.
Ok so now it has MP3’s! Maybe it’s useful after all!?
Well, hold on to that notion for a second. Because I haven’t played much with it, but I uploaded a bunch of MP3’s, asked it to “add all” to a new playlist .. and it thought about it for a while then said “No”, leaving me with a playlist of exactly one mp3 file.
I get the feeling it’s trying to store the mp3 playlist back on the 30Kb of phone memory. I gave up at this point.
I never got the auto clock set function to work, or the internet function.
The clock seems to drift behind real time. If you turn the phone off, then back on again, the clock seems to carry on from where it was when you turned the phone off.
The internet feature requires settings that I don’t have and don’t know how to get for my mobile provider. It isn’t documented either.

The ugly:
So this multimedia, camera, flash light, internet browser phone with a micro SD slot you just bought?
Forget all of those functions.
Actually you bought a basic mobile phone that can do phone calls and texts. If that’s all you need it for, then great! You got a cheap mobile. But it does feel like a very cheap plastic, misleadingly sold phone. There is basically no point even putting a micro SD card in it. You aren’t going to be proudly demonstrating what your cheap Chinese feature phone can do, in fact you might be constantly slightly worried that the clock on it is wrong.