• Hands on: Archos 55 Platinum

    That's the problem with the Archos 55 Platinum, judging by the specs and attractive price, the phone should be better than it is. We tried it out for a few days to see if modern smartphone addicts would be happy with a phone that costs five times less than the most desirable top-tier model on the market.
     
    The Archos 55 Platinum costs around £80 in the UK, which is about $115. For that little money, you get a 5.5-inch screen, a quad-core processor, a 13-megapixel rear camera, a MicroSD card slot, and a relatively slim, lightweight device. It's also quite nice looking, with a soft-touch back cover - an attractive blue color on our test unit - and some metal inlays on the sides. The volume control rocker has a contoured design, the speaker cutout is small and unobtrusive, and the sleep/wake button is easy to reach.
     
    The 55 Platinum certainly doesn't feel like a cheap piece of hardware. It's comfortable to hold, lightweight enough to fit in your pocket, but its front and back are practically fingerprint magnets.
     
    First impressions were good, but with more use, the 55 Platinum started to disappoint. The large 5.5-inch screen has equally large bezels, and underneath there are some annoyingly unresponsive softkeys that don't light up until you poke around to try to find them. They sit lower on the front of the phone than many other devices, so they're easy to miss. The screen resolution is 1,280 x 720 pixels, so icons look blurry and streaming videos are disappointing. At this price, though, one You shouldn't expect a Full HD screen.
     
    Not a gaming phone
    However, the screen, while not great, is one of the better features of the 55 Platinum. What holds it back is the overall performance of the device. The processor is not a Qualcomm chip, or even a MediaTek processor, but one made by Spreadtrum, and there's a reason we don't come across these chips very often. It runs at 1.3GHz and comes with 1GB of RAM. This value is low and really noticeable. We often use Crossy Road, Danmaku Unlimited, and Riptide GP 2 as test applications to judge performance. The game only really ran when we turned the graphics settings to the lowest possible setting. Even with Riptide GP 2's middling graphics, the game stuttered, paused, and became unplayable.
     
    The phone has an older version of Android 5.1 Lollipop installed, so it's quite outdated and it takes a while to open apps, share pictures, and perform general phone-related tasks. The situation gets worse as an application becomes more advanced, putting it at risk of security vulnerabilities without software updates.
     
    If all you plan to do is check Twitter, use Gmail, and some pretty average gaming (Hill Climb Racing, for example) will do the job, the 55 Platinum will do the job, but you'll need to be patient. Ask it to do anything more strenuous and you'll quickly become frustrated. The good news is that Android is pretty much untouched by Archos, with almost no pre-installed apps. You can even choose to reject them when you set up the phone, and there's no visible skin on top of Lollipop. The camera does make up for the shortcomings of the 55 Platinum somewhat. No, it doesn't challenge the LG G5 or Galaxy S7, but it does take some decent photos with tons of color and detail. However, it doesn't like cloudy days and will soon wash out the sky. The phone uses the standard Google Android camera app, which has an HDR mode and the ability to manually change exposure. For a cheap smartphone, it takes photos that people are happy to show off, but their quality is hard to say.
     
    Archos 55 Platinum battery life
    When testing smartphones quickly, we rarely need to charge thesmartphones battery  more than once in the first few days. If we include the first charge upon arrival, the Archos 55 Platinum requires two to three. That's bad. During a full day of use, including gaming, photos, benchmarks, and some GPS use , our Archos 55 Platinum got 10 hours of  Archos 55 Platinum battery life. Keep in mind, this isn't an octa-core monster phone with a Quad HD screen, so battery life really shouldn't be that bad.
     
    It's a good thing the phone has a removable Archos 55 Platinum battery, since you'll need to carry around a dozen extras. The only thing that sucks is the charging speed, which takes over three hours to complete. That's really bad for the 2,400 mAh Archos 55 Platinum battery. It's well below what we'd expect from a device like this, and we doubted it was an issue on our test phone because the software has almost no bloat or apps that might unnecessarily drain the battery.
     
    Archos Phones Batteryissues are an issue for the Archos 55 Platinum, because otherwise, it does exactly what we'd expect from a $115 phone:Some slowdowns and poorer screen quality, but usable. Unfortunately it doesn't connect to 4G networks either. It can only manage HSDPA 3G speeds via a dual-SIM configuration.
     
    However, no one is buying the 55 Platinum because it's their dream phone, but because they only have $115 to spend. It's a decent value in that regard, but the Archos 55 Platinum battery life is shocking for a fairly basic phone. You need to know what you 're getting with the Archos 55 Platinum, and don't expect any phone running Android 5.1 now to still be acceptable a year from now.


    Brand New 2400mAh/8.8WH AC55PL Battery for ARCHOS 55 PLATINUM

    The ARCHOS AC55PL phone battery is like any other battery - it eventually and inevitably wears out. ARCHOS AC55PL batteries are designed to last up to 500 charges or life cycles. Now, what you should do is buy a good quality AC55PL replacement battery. You need to avoid cheap, low-quality alternatives as they are not durable and can cause fire hazards.
     

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