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Review: MySaga C1 Smartphone

Mysaga C1 is a low-end, dual-sim Android smartphone made by Mysaga mobile. Apart from being based in China and having plenty of glorious Engrish on their website, their model C1 smartphone does seem to pack a fair amount of features for the price, which at time of writing is around 80 USD incl. shipping.

1 Specifications

* Runs Android 4.2.2 * 4.0" TN LCD with a 2-point capacitive touch screen, 480 * 800 resolution * MTK 6572 SoC, dual-core Cortex-A7 @ 1.3 GHz * 512 MB of RAM * WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS, gryro and acceleration sensor * One 3G sim-slot, one GSM sim-slot. Both can be standby at the same time. * 2 megapixel back-facing camera, 300 kilopixel front facing camera

A more complete report can be found Here. I'll assume you've already done research on this before, about what frequency bands it supports and the like.

2 Multi-sim standby

The multi-sim standby works well enough, and it's not too fiddly to use. To make a call, you can either set a sim that'll always be used to make calls, or you can make it ask you every time. Which looks something like this: 1 2 3.

You can also do this for SMS. You can also bind a contact to a specific SIM, so that you can, for example, automatically call a set of contacts using SIM2, and all others the other one. Useful if you have a work-number and a private number in the same phone.

For mobile data, you have to choose one of them, this is probably a limitation in Android.

3 Battery life

As you'd expect with a smartphone, especially a cheap one, battery life just isn't very good compared to a good old dumbphone.

I've found that the battery is good for about a day of medium-heavy use. In standby without touching it at all, it could probably go 4-5 days.

I have not really done much testing on the talk-time, as I do not talk much on the phone.

WiFi and GPS will really start sucking the battery dry, so an easy way to save battery is to just turn off WiFi and let it use your SIM for data.

4 Camera

I did not buy this phone expecting a usable camera, but I thought I'd mention it here anyway.

To sum it up: It's not very good. It's adequate for sharing stuff on the social medias, but I wouldn't rely on it for personal archival. Here's some samples: Decent light indoors: 1 2 3 4 Video

5 Display

The display is one of my biggest gripe with this smartphone. It's not IPS. The viewing angle is pretty narrow, which is annoying if you use it in bed or simlar. However, the small viewing angle it has does coincide with looking right onto it, which I guess is a natural enough angle.

It comes with a display protector already attached. I don't really like it, it does not repel fingerprints, and it scratches quite easily.

6 Overall

If you're just looking for a cheap smartphone with the most essential features, dual-sim and 3G, this one is hard to beat for the price. Sure, it'd be nice if it ran a real OS instead of Android, and also nice if it had a bit more RAM and CPU-power (for example, when you've been doing something RAM/CPU-intensive, the launcher will stutter a little.)

It gets the job done, quality isn't that bad. You may want to replace the display protector though.

7/10, I do not regret buying.

UPDATE: It would seem Mysaga mobile is no longer in business, as they website is now about sex toys...Mysaga C1 is a low-end, dual-sim Android smartphone made by Mysaga mobile. Apart from being based in China and having plenty of glorious Engrish on their website, their model C1 smartphone does seem to pack a fair amount of features for the price, which at time of writing is around 80 USD incl. shipping.


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Comments for Review: MySaga C1 Smartphone

  • stacy

    having problems with 3g pay as you go settings. cannot use the internet unless connected to wifi. can someone help me with this issue as i need this for work. thanks

    • Slaeshjag

      You may also need to select the simcard you want to use for data in settings → sim management

    • Slaeshjag

      Did you enable mobile data in settings → data usage?

  • brian

    I can't retrieve pictures people sent by text

  • ata

    I accidently deleted play store from my phone Please help!

  • John

    Hi. I need a smartphone to use with Paypal here chip and pin, which apparently :In order to use the card reader, an Android device must have Bluetooth 2.0 (or higher) and support both capturing devices and peripheral card readers via Serial Port profile (SPP). Do you know if this phone would suffice?

    thanks

  • anon

    Hello, i have recently lost my phone and some i need something to use temporarily. i was going to buy a refurbished or used blackberry 9700 on ebay but i came across the mysaga phone. in your option which phone do you think is better. i dont know much about the technical side of phones but i know that it needs to be able to have some apps like whatsapp and gmail. i use the internet quite a lot, just to search for school stuff on Wikipedia. do you think i should buy a blackberry or try the my saga, i will be using the phone for about 4 months. thanks

    • Slaeshjag

      I have never even seen a blackberry in real life, so I can't really compare them. The MySaga one is a google-play enabled phone, so everything in google play should work on it. If you can find the apps you want there, it should work. For just looking up stuff on wikipedia, the browser will be fine. Just make sure to close apps you're done with (hold home to enter window manager) or it'll get slow and eat a lot of battery after a few days. For just a few months, I'd personally be more inclined to get the cheaper of the two, but I'm quite sure the Mysaga one would be able to get the job done.