Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I want to start by saying I was very skeptical about buying this phone because I have never heard of UMIDIGI. Lets face it, $200 is $200. To me that is still a lot of money to take a risk on a brand I have never heard of. Within the last year I have had a Galaxy S8, Xiaomi MI A2 Lite, and a Motorola G6 Play(for comparison). Below are the reasons why I got rid of those phones and chose this phone... Phone must have: 1. Large battery with good battery life (sorry Galaxy S8) 2. All LTE bands for US (Sorry Xiaomi I need band 17) 3. A decent processor (Sorry G6 Play....so SLOW) 4. NFC 5. 1080p (not necessary but definitely a plus) 6. Decent camera I find myself drawn to the phones India and China get because they are practical. Midrange specs with good battery life and decent camera, I don't need a flagship phone. When I used GSM Arena's phone finder and put the specs in I was looking for(including LTE bands), this was the only phone that kept coming up that was in my price range. So I decided to take a chance on the F1 since it had all the things I felt were important in a phone. I have been very pleased with the phone so far(3 weeks of use now)! There are a fewsmall problems, I'm not sure if these are related to UMIDIGI software or Android Pie, since this is my first phone with Pie. The main issue I have is some of my home automation like Ring and August don't receive notifications unless I am already in the app. I don't get notified when somebody rings the door bell or my August lock doesn't auto unlock(working with August on that). There again, I don't know if that is an issue with Android Pie or UMIDIGI. I don't get notificatons for my Messenger app either. I have made sure notifications were turned on for those apps and battery optimization was turned off. I get all the notifications for phone calls and texts which is most important to me. The battery life has been really good! That might be why I don't get my notifications, but its been worth it. I can typically go 2 days without charging. I attached pics of some of the battery usage. Note last charge time and screen on time. Camera is decent, not as good as my S8 but wasn't expecting it to be. Sometimes I have to take a picture several times in order to get a good one. The picture of my dog was taken in complete darkness, it took 3 tries to get that one. The picture of my shoes was with the Bokeh effect turned all the way up. So if you don't mind taken a few pics in order to get the good one, then this camer will work for you. There has been 2 software updates so far, one when I first got the phone and one within the last couple of weeks. The latter fixed a bug with deleting pictures, the trash label was partially missing. Now with that update there is a bug where changing to multiple windows and clearing them individually the window shakes for a few seconds. Nothing big but I hope UMIDIGI will come out with a software update to fix that too. I think if UMIDIGI stays on top of their software updates they could be the next Xiaomi. Software was really my main concern about buying this phone. It would be REALLY NICE to see UMIDGI started using Android One platform. I tried to touch on some of the things that weren't out there. If you want to know about the screen, finger print reader, sound etc.... I think that has been covered well enough with other reviews.... UPDATE: There was another update and it fixed the window shaking problem I had. Pretty impressed that they have been updating the phone to fix minor bugs. Keep it up UMIDIGI! Would like to see a security patch update though... UPDATE 2: At work I have noticed that my phone calls have been less than stellar. When making a call I put it on speaker phone and watched the screen and noticed that it will switch from 4G to 3G when making calls. I work at a camp and it is isolated, we have 4G towers at camp so we have really good 4G signal but we have almost no 3G. Needless to say this has been a problem, not having a signal for phone calls, and when I do they have been choppy. I don't think this is an issue with UMIDIGI but with Cricket/ATT. They don't recognize unlocked phones for VoLTE. I talked to their technical support to no avail. Just to make sure I checked my unlocked Moto G6 Play and it does the exact same thing. Now this was never a problem at my house where we get a really good 4G and 3G signal. This has been enough of a nuisance at my work that I had to get a new phone. Since it had to be a Cricket/ATT branded phone in order to get VoLTE I picked up the Motorola G7 Supra since battery life is the most important thing for me. I have also noticed some connectivity issues with Bluetooth headphones. It losses volume for a split second and then comes back on. This might happen every 5 minutes or so. For people complaining about short battery life they must have a rogue app or something. I have never had less than 40% battery life left at the end of the day, and that was using my phone a lot. All that being said I still really like the phone. It looks like my son will be upgrading to an F1.