The IMO Q is the sort of phone you might buy for your kids, for a festival or a mad holiday you think your iPhone might not survive, as it's cheap enough to be almost disposable for many buyers.
Given its tiny price, undercutting even the likes of the Moto E3, the IMO Q is predictably basic. It’s slow, the screen is ugly and it’s one of the few handsets this year to use a microSIM rather than a nanoSIM.
Phones a little more expensive than this have improved massively in the last few years, while the IMO Q is a trial to use, just like the ultra-cheap phones of old.
But, y’know, that’s just IMO. And at this end of the market even a small difference in price can be significant, so despite its failings is the IMO Q still worth considering?
IMO Q price and release date
- Out now in the UK
- RRP of £49.99 but often available for less
The IMO Q is available now in the UK and its RRP is just £49.99. But as cheap as that is you can already find it for less online.
And you will have to venture online, as this isn't a phone you'll find in high street stores or on the shelves at the big networks.
Shop around and it can be yours for free on tariffs from £10 which include 1GB of data - ensuring the IMO Q is affordable however you decide to purchase it.
Key features and design
- Very low price
- Bland design
- No 4G
From one angle, the IMO Q is a phone for the common person, for those who can’t afford or can't justify mobiles encased in glass and the type of aluminium we always hear called “aircraft grade”.
You could daydream a meeting where the people behind IMO got together, incensed by the amount of cash Samsung and Apple expect people to pay for a phone. And so, the IMO Q was born.
This never happened, as far as we know. But if we started by describing the IMO Q in plain terms, you might have stopped reading already. It’s plastic, grey and dull-looking, a classic low-cost, low-effort design that could have been picked at random out of the great big catalogue of Chinese handsets.
The IMO Q is the sort of phone that could have been released any time in the past 5 years. We’d have perhaps been impressed in 2010. Now? Not so much.
However, it’s small, it’s comfy to hold and unlike some dire old budget phones the top layer of the screen is glass rather than plastic. It doesn’t have a fingerprint-resisting oleophobic coating and doesn’t use brand-name toughened glass, but we’ve not managed to scratch it yet.
This is a style of phone we don’t see too often anymore, one whose back is a single piece of plastic you can pull off to get access to the battery, the SIM slot and so on. It takes us back to 2012, and there’s really nothing wrong with this build other than that it’s not ‘fancy’. At this price we don’t expect fancy.
It almost goes without saying that you don’t get water resistance, a fingerprint scanner or other such flashy bits. The most serious omission is 4G, as this is one of the few new non-4G phones. Whether this is a problem or not really depends on the quality of your network’s 3G.
Contrary to 4G’s messaging, 3G internet can be decently fast, but it certainly isn’t a lot of the time. If you have a 4G phone at the moment, you can give 3G a test drive by switching off 4G in the settings menu. Our Three UK test connection was passable, but a clear step down from 4G.
The IMO Q has a few big holes, but there are some notable elements. It has 8GB of storage, which doesn’t sound like a lot but gives you a few spare gigabytes to play with, thanks to the relatively slimline Android install used here.
It’ll fit a few storage-chomping games or a reasonable on-the-go music library. Older phones at this price used to have just 4GB: truly piddly.
Under the back panel there’s also a microSD card slot, so you can upgrade the memory banks.
The IMO Q also has dedicated pads for the soft keys below the screen, rather than pure software ones. It’s a good job they’re here, as with a 4-inch screen there’s much less display space than most of us are used to.
Display
- Low resolution
- Weak viewing angles
- Washed out colours
This is among the smallest-screen Android phones you can buy, and the technology the IMO Q features is quite basic. The majority of phones sold today have IPS LCD screens, a panel type designed to stop displays looking weird when viewed from an angle.
The IMO Q has a more basic TN (twisted nematic) display that only looks right dead-on. Tilt it back and the image appears washed out, tilt it forwards and a shadow creeps over the screen. This is called contrast shift, and it’s an ugly effect we don’t see very often in phones these days.
We doubt many people after a phone this cheap are hardcore mobile gamers or looking to watch Netflix on their handset, but this panel type spoils enjoyment of these activities.
Even dead-on, the IMO Q’s image quality is quite a lot worse than some phones just a little pricier. Colours are cold-looking and washed out, and the resolution is low at 480 x 800 pixels.
We notice the other issues more than the low pixel density, but if you’re ‘upgrading’ from a busted 720p phone this is a major downgrade. It also lacks an auto brightness setting, meaning you have to manually play with the brightness slider as you head outside.
One alternative phone to consider at the bottom end of the market is the Moto E3. It has a higher-quality IPS LCD screen with much better colour and resolution.
Unless you’re used to typing on a tiny screen, you’ll find typing on the IMO Q a chore too. We knew it was going to be a struggle, our fingers more accustomed to 5-inch-plus displays these days, but there also seems to be issues with where the touchscreen registers presses towards the edge of the display, and it mistakes fast taps between characters as swipes.
All-but-forgotten cheap Windows Lumia phones like the ancient Lumia 520 really nailed typing on tiny screens, but it’s borderline painful here. There is a solution, though: swipe typing. This is where you draw a line between characters rather than tapping on them individually.
However, you need a bit of know-how to get this working, as you need to install a different keyboard from Google Play and turn the feature on. We doubt whether many prospective buyers would necessarily have read enough of our tips and tricks articles to know this.
Interface and reliability
- Dated version of Android
- Slow at moving between apps and screens
The IMO Q runs Android 5.1 Lollipop. This is a very dated release at this point, and is more prone to slowdown than Android 6.0 when dealing with limited RAM.
You can guess what the IMO Q has. That’s right, limited RAM. It’s slow throughout. Slow to turn on, slow to load apps, slow to make the keyboard pop-up and even a little slow to skip between the home screens and apps menu at times.
If you’re low on patience, this probably isn’t the right phone for you.
The interface is similar to vanilla Android 5.1 in a very broad sense, but the IMO Q has a custom skin that changes the look.
For example, the icons are different and where normal Android has an apps drawer backed by a blank ‘sheet’ of white, this one uses a slightly dimmed version of the home screen background, and pages rather than a vertical scroll of icons.
It’s a mostly inoffensive alteration. We’d prefer the generic Material UI look of standard Android 5.1, but we’d be happy enough if it wasn’t for the headache-inducing performance. This is compounded by quite how tricky we find typing on the tiny, possibly poorly calibrated touchscreen.
Movies, music and gaming
- Few pre-installed apps
- Flat sound
- Weak display makes it rubbish for games and video
The IMO Q is not a great phone for movies or gaming, this should come as no surprise. Its screen is small and is not of great quality.
It’ll do the job in a pinch, of course, but we honestly can’t imagine watching a whole film on this screen. The display also has an impact on gaming. While the resolution isn’t a huge issue thanks to the teeny display size, the poor colour and limited contrast are. And as you’ll see in the next section, there’s not enough power on tap for high-end titles.
Speaker quality is nothing special either. While the sound doesn’t distort at max volume, the IMO Q isn’t very loud and the tone can charitably be described as basic. It’s flat and crude.
If you do want to play music or video, you’ll have to find your own apps to do so. The IMO Q even lacks the ‘Gallery’ app that is so often the default barebones media player.
This is really a better outcome than its polar opposite: a phone so rammed with ‘complimentary’ apps it resembles a rubbish dump. Downloading a few extra apps from Google Play only takes a couple of minutes, so this is no major problem.
Specs and benchmark performance
- Poor gaming performance
- Very low Geekbench 4 score
The IMO Q has a Spreadtrum chipset. This isn’t a hugely popular or well-known brand, but even Samsung has used some of its chips in low-end phones.
It’s a quad-core 1.2GHz SoC using dated Cortex-A7 cores. While we primarily blame the limited 1GB of RAM for the phone’s dire day-to-day performance, this chip is also not quite strong enough to do justice to Android’s more taxing games, despite the low 480 x 800 screen resolution.
There’s enough chug in 3D racer Asphalt 8 to dilute your enjoyment. Casual games run passably well, but they’re still tripped-up by very slow load times, a finicky touchscreen and the low display quality. The IMO Q zaps some of the fun out of mobile gaming, so spend a little more if you play a lot.
In Geekbench 4, the IMO Q achieves a multi-core score of 982, and that says it all. This is a very low score, almost doubled by other ‘budget’ phones.
For the hardcore techies out there, the CPU is a 32-bit chipset made using a 28nm process. Both of these are rather out of date at this point, although to give Spreadtrum some credit, the latest low-end Snapdragon 212 is still 32-bit/28nm.
Battery life
- Awful results in our battery test
- Can just about last a day of mixed use
- Slow to charge
Using a low-end CPU might make you hope for fairly good battery life in the IMO Q, but that too is poor. Playing a 720p video at maximum brightness for 90 minutes took a disastrous 53% off the battery.
By comparison the Wileyfox Spark - which also has disappointing battery life - dropped by 35% in the same test, while the Moto E (2015) dropped just 22%.
Day-to-day the IMO Q doesn’t seem quite this bad, and we did get much more familiar “just about a day” performance in general use. However, this is probably because the phone’s performance discourages you from using the thing much.
Our browsing habits took a nosedive because skipping around websites is often a trial using the IMO Q.
We’re not quite sure why video playback proved such an epic fail either, as the 1450mAh battery sounds about right for a 4-inch 480 x 800 display. One possible explanation is that the IMO Q doesn’t manage its CPU power properly when given a fairly light task like video playback.
Charging is also slow. You’ll need to charge overnight ideally as a full recharge takes a few hours.
Camera
- Poor image quality
- Fairly effective HDR mode
The IMO Q has extremely basic cameras. A 5MP camera sits on the back, a 2MP selfie shooter up front.
While the rear camera has a flash to help your nighttime portraits, it misses out on an even more rudimentary feature - autofocus. A fixed-focus lens means you can’t shoot close-up shots.
You have almost zero control while shooting, as pressing the screen doesn’t even alter the exposure to suit your subject.
Given no focusing is involved, you might assume the IMO Q is going to be quick to shoot. It’s not. There’s a full second of shutter lag between pressing the shutter button and the shot actually being taken, making the process of using the camera frustrating.
Image quality is poor in all conditions, photos appearing noisy and fizzy even with perfect lighting. Contrast is poor, colours often undersaturated and the level of detail captured unimpressive.
The one brief highlight is the camera app’s HDR mode, which is fairly effective, and dynamic range adjustments are sound even when HDR isn’t used.
Given the price of the IMO Q, we could forgive the dodgy image quality if the camera was at least fun to use, but it’s just too slow for that.
You can capture video too, but only at 720p. It’s also subject to the same washed-out look as the photos if you shoot indoors.
The front camera comes across a little better, but largely only because ‘minimum’ standards for selfie shooters have improved in recent years. A phone like this would once have had a VGA camera, but the 2MP one here can at least render some finer detail.
In the wider field of sub-£100/$100/AU$170 budget phones it’s still fairly limited, though. White balance is often off and tight-knit textures can cause some truly weird looking image distortion effects. It’ll do for quick Twitter selfies, mind.
Camera samples
Budget phones have improved massively over the last three years. The IMO Q is a reminder that there are still major compromises involved if you can’t afford the cash that all-but guarantees you a good baseline quality level, though.
Even though the phone is available for peanuts at certain spots online, we’d suggest you spend a little more on a mobile with better performance.
Who's this for?
The IMO Q is for people who want to spend as little as possible on a phone, but don’t want to drop down to the sort of feature phone that only makes calls and sends texts. In theory, you can do almost anything on this phone possible on a much more expensive model.
We wouldn’t go as far as to call it a disposable Android when it costs more than a lot of us like to spend on someone’s birthday present, but the low price is clearly the whole point here.
Should you buy it?
Penny-pinchers of the world are likely to be drawn in by the IMO Q. It’s cheap, and yet it gets you a reasonably complete Android experience, technically.
However, you feel the budget cuts a little too harshly. Poor general performance and a lack of optimisation in core parts of the hardware including the touchscreen are a constant reminder the phone you’re using isn’t all that great.
If the issues were restricted to the camera and gaming, we wouldn’t mind so much. When every app takes so long to load, and there’s even a wait for the keyboard to finally show up when you tap a text input box, we think you deserve better.
Using the IMO Q is a frustrating experience. It’s far too slow and the touchscreen is flat-out unreliable, making the most basic of phone tasks a chore. You probably don’t want this mobile.
The IMO Q is cheaper than almost any other smartphone, but for not too much more money you can get a whole lot more phone. Here are four handsets you might want to consider instead.
Motorola Moto E3
The tiny budget phone of choice is the Motorola Moto E3. It’s a little larger, more expensive, and nowhere near as widely-sold as the popular Moto G4. However, it’s a real step up from the IMO Q if you can afford it.
Its screen is better, as it has a 5-inch 720p IPS LCD display, performance is superior and the design slightly less bland too. While not a like-for-like competitor for the IMO Q, it’s worth considering.
- Read our Moto E3 review
Wileyfox Spark
Wileyfox’s cheapest Android is the Spark, and it has a much better screen than the IMO Q, making it better for watching videos.
It suffers from similar performance problems, although to a slightly lesser extent. Using the Spark at its worst is the phone equivalent of being whipped. Using the IMO Q is like being whipped and then having vinegar occasionally flicked into your flesh wounds.
Neither is a great option, but the Spark is slightly less of a hardship to put up with.
- Read our Wileyfox Spark review
Nokia 222
If your budget really can’t stretch any further, you might want to consider going all-in with the belt-tightening and buy a feature phone like the Nokia 222.
This is a lot like the phones we used to use before 2008, when Android arrived. It’s only good for calls and texts, taking utterly dreadful photos and, blast from the past, listening to FM radio.
However, its battery lasts for ages and while it can barely do anything, it will at least be quick and easy to use.
Cubot Rainbow
Stuck between not wanting to spend any real cash but not wanting a dud or dumb phone? It’s time to get feisty. You might want to consider one of the Chinese import brands that never make it into phone networks.
The Cubot Rainbow has actually made it into some retail stores in the UK, though, and offers great value for money. For £59/$75 (around AU$100) you get 16GB of storage, a 5.0-inch 720p screen and a 13MP rear camera.
We haven’t reviewed this ourselves yet and its 1GB of RAM sets off some alarm bells, but when the IMO Q is the alternative, it’s one to consider.
First reviewed: December 2016
