A mini VKWorld Stone V3S mobile phone review

Sighs… Ok here we go.

If you avoided buying the Lingwin N1 in the last mini review, you might have spotted the VKWorld Stone V3S at a bit above that price range.

It’s this thing here: http://www.vkworld.cc/product/v3s

You might also want to skim through my review of the Lingwin first. Because reasons: https://zomcul.svbtle.com/a-mini-lingwin-n1-mobile-phone-review

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.

Waaaaiiiittt a minute. That’s exactly what I said about the Lingwin N1.
Suspicious face
That’s because it’s exactly the same layout. Hmmmm.

The good:
A very useable screen size, with easy to navigate menus and options. The battery life should in theory be awesome. It’s rated at 2200mAh which is massively more than it should need. The keypad is back lit and easy to read even in bad light. It has a nice feeling weight to it. You can actually flip between upper and lower case, so text entry is possible, although yet again it lacks any kind of T9 or predictive text.
There’s no obvious reason why, but the camera on this works better than the Lingwin, even though it appears to be exactly the same camera with exactly the same software. It’s still very low resolution, but you can actually see sharp edges to objects with this one.

The UH OH…
It’s exactly the same firmware as the Lingwin N1. The only differences I’ve seen so far are the larger screen area, and 85.5Kb of phone memory, not 60kb like the Lingwin.

The bad:
Pauses to take a long deep breath…

The LED light function is roughly equivalent to holding two matches.
Readers of the Lingwin review will be delighted to know that this has two feeble LED’s barely lighting up anything instead of one.
Without a micro SD card, this thing comes with a whopping 85.5Kb of memory. That’s not a typo. Kilobytes. Sadly, again, over half of that is used by the phone.
So you still can’t take a picture with the camera and save it.
With a micro SD in place, It’s exactly the same as the Lingwin. Incredibly slow for uploads, but I put some MP3’s on it again just in case.
This time I tried a little harder than I did with the Lingwin. I can make a playlist of about 50 entries, but apparently nothing longer than that. Soooo fairly useless then.
Once again (because it’s the exact same firmware).. 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:
It’s basically a slightly nicer Lingwin N1, and that isn’t saying much.
The multimedia, camera, flash light, internet browser phone with a micro SD slot you just bought? Yeah you can still 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.

At this point in my investigations I can only recommend that you NEVER BUY CHEAP CHINESE MOBILE PHONES

Oh and this one came with a bulging battery. This is a “very bad thing”. See here for more details and warnings: https://www.howtogeek.com/244846/what-to-do-when-your-phone-or-laptop-has-a-swollen-battery/

Basically it’s plastic trash and shouldn’t be being sold.