The BLU R1 HD made waves this summer when Amazon started selling the 5 inch smartphone for as little as $50 to customers willing to put up with the ads that come with an Amazon Prime Exclusive phone (or who were willing to hack the cheap phone).

But Amazon stopped selling the phone in October, and a few weeks later, news broke that might have provided at least one reason: it turns out one of BLU’s software partners had installed an application that was sending data to China without permission.

BLU released updates to remove that software from the BLU R1 HD and other affected phones, which may be why Amazon recently started selling the $50 smartphone again.

What you get for $50 is a phone with a 5 inch, 1280 x 720 pixel display, a 1.3 GHz MediaTek 6735M quad-core processor, 1GB of RAM, 8GB of storage, and Android 6.0 software.

There’s also a model with 2GB of RAM and 16GB of storage that sells for $60 if you buy the Prime Exclusive model.

Amazon also sells ad-free versions of the phones, but you’ll have to pay an extra $50 for those. At that point, the BLU R1 HD is reasonably well priced, but a bit less competitive with other budget phones.

Other fatures include dual SIM support, a microSD card slot, an 8MP rear camera, a 5MP front camera, and support for 4G LTE.

via AFTVNews

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9 replies on “Amazon’s $50 Blu R1 HD smartphone is back”

  1. My partner rooted mine, I love it so far. Camera isn’t great, but for $60 for the 16gb model you can’t go wrong

  2. I picked one of these up to tide me over until the Black Friday sales this year and I have to say it’s a very capable device. Solid hardware design, decently fast, expandable storage etc. The only downsides are that the camera isn’t going to win any awards and that if you buy the prime version you have to deal with lockscreen ads (or follow a guide on xda-developers to convert it to the ad-free version)

  3. Blu phones haven’t been very reliable in the past
    based on their Amazon reviews.

    1. I’ve had several and have had good luck with all of them. Of course, I’m just one of many experiences though.

  4. There a several reports on Amazon about this phone catching on fire. I guess it doesn’t make the news because Blu is such a small player.

    1. Blu went and replied to those people and they have yet to respond back with information, more likely a scam or something was done to the phone to cause it to happen.

  5. It would be nuts to buy the $50 model if you could get one with 2x the ram and storage for $10 more. 1GB of ram doesn’t work too well on a phone, unless maybe you just use it as a phone.

  6. i have two. one of them works great. the other has an annoying issue that i have to push the power button several times before it actually responds. quite annoying. I stopped using it and replaced it with LeEco S3 which was an extra $100 but way better. Can get Alcatel Idol 4 with VR goggles from Cricket for $100 and unlock code is $3 on ebay. There are just better options right now…

    1. That’s actually really nice specs. Pretty good if you want a phone to waste on games/crap and prefer to keep the phone for work 😉

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