Nuu X6 review: You can get a lot of phone for less than $100 in 2020

Nuu is a smaller brand that's responsible for some pretty decent unlocked phones. We reviewed the Nuu G3 a few years ago and found a few issues with the device, but overall it was a pretty great phone for the price tag at the time.

They've followed things up with the Nuu X6, which looks to bring the company's smartphone design forward a few years. You're looking at a hole-punch display, fingerprint scanner, and Android 9, but most importantly, you're getting a $90 price tag.

Can a sub-$100 phone be any good in 2020? Let's find out.

Design

The phone's design honestly isn't bad. This is something that we noted with our previous Nuu review, too; despite the cheaper price tag, they don't cut too many corners on how the phone actually looks and feels. That's a big deal.

Yes, it's made of plastic, and the bezels are definitely there, but it's got a good amount of weight to it with a fairly balanced distribution, so it feels good in hand. It manages to avoid some of the cheaper plasticky feeling that even older Samsung flagships couldn't escape, so props to Nuu for that.

It's not all perfect, though. The chin is massive on this thing, and the screen is rounded off incredibly aggressively. I guess it sort of looks nice with that friendly round appearance, but sometimes you'll literally get stuff cut off in the corners because of how round it is. That's a really strange design choice that I don't think has anything to do with the price. There's a waterdrop notch for the camera at the top of the screen, too.

The back comes off of the Nuu X6, which is a rarity these days.  You get full access to the phone's battery and dual SIM card/microSD card slots, if you're still the type who likes to hot swap batteries.

The bottom houses two speakers and a microUSB port, while the headphone jack sits up top. The power button and volume buttons are on the right side, with the left side of the phone empty.

It's good. It's not great, but this is still probably the best $90 phone design you're going to get.

Hardware

Performance

This is an area where I expected to need tempered expectations. It's a $90, surely the performance is going to be mediocre, right? This ended up being pretty surprising.

The Nuu X6 uses a MediaTek Helio A22 (MT6761) CPU, which is a quad-core A53 processor running at 2.0GHz. It's nothing to write home about, but you know what? It's not bad.

I could very easily browse the web while listening to music in the background, and hopping over to other apps to check notifications, emails, texts, whatever, really didn't slow down the phone at all. The phone's software and 3GB of RAM tends to be the bottleneck in keeping apps open, since Nuu's DuraBoost will kill open apps in the background to ration resources.

The screen is also surprisingly great for such a cheap device. It's a 5.71″ HD+ display, and presumably some kind of LCD, although I can't seem to find any confirmation on that. However, it really is a great LCD. Viewing angles are good, colors and contrast are excellent, and it's one of the best displays I've seen in this price range.

Unfortunately it's paired with some very middling, tinny speakers. Listening to music on it just wasn't pleasant, and it can really crush the ambiance out of video games and movies. The phone has a headphone jack, and you're going to want to use it.

Battery

Battery life is actually pretty good on the Nuu X6, despite a smaller 2800mAh battery. You're not going to push multiple days off a single charge, but I didn't struggle to get through an entire day of normal usage here. The processor is pretty power efficient, which helps, but it'll also chew up battery if you throw too much at it. Heavy gaming really seemed to slaughter the battery, so I wouldn't look here for a solid gaming performer.

The only thing that's a real negative of the battery life is the slow charging speeds. It's a microUSB port, and as far as I can tell it doesn't offer any kind of fast charging. If you don't charge this thing overnight, it's gonna die.

There's no “five hours of use from 15 minutes of charge!” wizardry here. It's just old-school, 2010 charging where you have to sit your phone down for a couple of hours for a full battery. Data transfer speeds from a PC are also not great, so use cloud storage when you can.

Software

There's not much to talk about the software on the Nuu X6. It's all pretty vanilla Android with just a few additions, like a DuraSpeed option in settings that allows you to prevent apps from going to sleep in the background.

Nuu tries to be pretty aggressive with apps to make do with the limited hardware, so you'll find it pretty frequently killing apps if you don't specify it here. It's good in that it'll keep apps from draining your battery, but you'll need to exclude your music apps and such in this part of the phone or it'll stop playback just trying to keep resources free.

Aside from that, I really couldn't find anything else notable to talk about. There are some themed app icons to make the phone stand out, but it's all pretty standard Android stuff. On the bright side, that means there's less bloat to take up the phone's 32GB of storage, so you can fill the phone up with just the stuff that you want.

Camera

The Nuu G3 struggled with its camera, and unfortunately, the Nuu X6 doesn't hold up any better. No matter how good cheaper smartphones get, it just doesn't seem like we're at the point where the really cheap options can compete on camera quality. This isn't exclusive to Nuu, but it doesn't exempt the X6 from having a simply mediocre camera.

Yes, it takes pictures, but that's about all I can say. Shots tend to seem blurry with washed out colors, and even aggressive post-editing and photography tricks can only get you so far.

The Nuu X6 has two cameras, presumably for depth and bokeh effects and portrait mode shots. But the end result is something that probably could've just been done in software, since it doesn't look natural at all after taking photos. It struggles to stay focused, and generally I wouldn't recommend trying to get fancy with this camera at all.

Again, it's hard to take points off here since you really shouldn't expect great images from a $90 smartphone, but keep this in mind. The camera's going to struggle in all but the most basic situations.

Worth it?

Going into this review, I honestly had pretty low expectations, considering the cheap price point of the Nuu X6. But after using it, I can say that was I was pleasantly surprised in a lot of ways.

Performance is good, and better than the Nuu G3's from a few years ago. Battery life was decent, albeit with that slow charging. If all you want is to watch YouTube or Netflix, browse the web, and maybe play a game or two every once in a while, this is actually a really good phone, and it's going to cost you less than $100 to pick one up.

The camera is still below average, and there are some weird things that hold the phone back, but at the price tag that Nuu is asking they're all pretty easy to overlook.

Nuu Mobile X6 | $89 | Amazon
Nuu X6 screen protector | $10| Amazon

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