The ZTE Tempo Go certainly doesn’t look like a very good phone. But with an $80 price tag, it’s a cheap on. And as the first Android Go smartphone to go up for order in the US, it promises slightly better performance than you’d expect from another phone with similar specs.

That’s because, like all Android Go edition phones, it will ship with a version of Google’s mobile operating system and suite of apps that are optimized for entry-level hardware.

ZTE’s first Android Go phone features a 5 inch, 854 x 480 pixel display, a 1.1 GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 210 quad-core processor, 1GB of RAM, and 8GB of storage plus a microSD card slot for up to 32GB of removable storage.

It has a 2,200 mAh battery, a 5MP rear camera, a 2MP front camera, 802.11b/g/n WiFi, Bluetooth 4.2, GPS, and support for 4G LTE.

There’s also a mciro USB port and a 3.5mm headphone jack (a feature you won’t find on many of today’s highest-priced phones… go figure).

The most interesting thing about the phone is that it will ship with Android Oreo Go Edition, which means you get a fairly recent build of Android as well as key apps that use about half as much storage space and which consume less data.

Those apps include a version of the Google app that uses fewer resources and brings Google Assistant to phones with 1GB of RAM for the first time, a Files Go app that helps you manage your storage and delete unnecessary files to free up space, and data saver features built into Chrome and the operating system (which would be more interesting if they weren’t also available on non-Go versions of Android Oreo).

Google offers Go versions of Google Maps and Gmail for streamlined performance on Android Go devices.

At a time when you can pick up a pretty good phone for just a little more money, the ZTE Tempo Go is still a pretty tough sell. I’m not sure I’d even recommend it as an iPod touch-like, WiFi-only device when there are cheaper options are available.

But if you’re on a tight budget but still need a phone that will work with multiple wireless networks, I suppose you could do worse than this $80 phone.

via Android Police

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4 replies on “$80 ZTE Tempo Go smartphone with Android Go is now available in the US”

    1. Consider it a commentary on the temporary status of all consumer electronics devices, particularly cheap ones. Or maybe it was just a typo.

  1. “At a time when you can pick up a pretty good phone for just a little more money, the ZTE Tempo Go is still a pretty tough sell. I’m not sure I’d even recommend it as an iPod touch-like, WiFi-only device when there are cheaper options are available.”

    That’s been my issue with the Android Go program. You can find good phones for cheap now. So trying to make a version of Android optimized for hardware that is arguably worse than phones in the same price bracket just doesn’t make any sense to me.

    And its not just in the US market. In other markets where Chinese phones are more prevalent you’ll find that its the same. Cheap phones that have better specs than these Android Go phones. I think it would have been smarter to target these phones for optimization rather than extremely low spec phones.

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