Hands-on review: Obi MV1

The Obi MV1 looks different to every other smartphone you can buy right now, but it's for all the wrong reasons.

There's no denying the design of the MV1 is unique, but it takes a lot of elements from other phones you can buy and puts them all together into one strange hybrid.

Obi is the Silicon Valley company set up by ex-Apple CEO John Sculley – the one who notoriously fired Steve Jobs before being let go himself – but although parts of the design feel slightly like the iPhone 6S, this is nothing like the things of beauty Apple creates.

Initially intended for developing markets, the Obi MV1 is now in the UK and will cost you just £119.

That's cheap, but this area of the market is now full of competition from the likes of Motorola and even new companies like Wileyfox.

On paper, the Obi MV1 looks like an interesting proposition and in my short time with the phone I've been quite impressed at the spec but not its packaging.

It all comes down to the design and I feel the company has made it look different to everything else and got too caught up in making it look unique rather than good. This isn't a beautifully designed smartphone.

You may think that's not possible in this price bracket, but the Wileyfox Storm proves a budget phone doesn't have to be ugly.

In its misguided mission Obi has decided to put a square element around the phone with the screen protruding out from it.

The bit tacked on the back of the MV1 is reminiscent of a budget Microsoft Lumia phone, but it looks like the display has been added in on top and it pokes out.

The marketing material from Obi reads, "It's a shape that is so unique for a smartphone that you'll always know which way your MV1 is placed in your pocket or bag."

I don't usually find that a problem and if I really need to know what way my phone is up I'll reach in for the volume rocker and know instantly.

It may be to some people's taste, but in the day or so I've used the phone no-one I've shown it to particularly enjoyed the look of it.

The back of the Obi MV1 isn't much nicer and to make matters worse it's a fingerprint magnet, but at least the panel can be removed easily to see the inside of the phone.

The display on the front is 5-inches so it's going to fit in almost anyone's hand. Picture quality is clear and it's a 720p screen. It's a bit disappointing it isn't a Full HD option, but the screen is still impressive even without the extra pixels.

The display on the MV1 has proven a little bit dark though and I've had to fiddle around with the brightness levels a little to get it right. There is an auto brightness mode as well but I've found it doesn't react very quickly.

As for the rest of the spec, it's quite impressive for a phone of this price. It comes with 16GB of internal storage, which I'd hoped would be 32GB but you do have microSD card support of up to 64GB to add in some extra.

The Obi MV1 comes with dual-SIM card slots as well as a removable battery, which isn't really a go-to feature for those in the west but if you're used to hot swapping this may be something that interests you.

The battery pack is a 2500mAh cell but I haven't had enough time with the phone yet to say whether it's good enough.

Under the hood there's also a 1.3GHz quad-core Snapdragon 212 processor and 2GB of RAM. The phone feels snappy so far and I haven't seen any performance issues in the first day of usage.

It runs the outdated Cyanogen 12 software that is based on Android 5.1 Lollipop though. It's a bit of a shame it's not running 13 so we can have all the Android Marshmallow features, but for the price it's hard to get upset about it.

Early verdict

The MV1 has tough competition from the many other cheap and powerful Android phones on the market. If you like the design it seems like the MV1 could be one to recommend, but I really don't like this look.

If you don't either, it's probably not worth buying up an Obi MV1.