BLU Tank II T193 Unlocked GSM Dual-SIM Cell Phone w/Camera and 1900 mAh Big Battery – Unlocked Cell Phones – Retail Packaging (Black/Red)

Not great, but for the price . . .
This phone is good for basic quick calls or a simple short text. PROS: cheap, it works, looks decent, the construction is fairly sturdy. CONS: not very user friendly, has no instruction manual, you cannot hear the phone ring even in a fairly quiet room, the alarm on its loudest is faint from a short distance, the cell reception is very poor with constant dropped calls making it not good for long conversations. I would not recommend buying this phone unless you just need it for an emergent situation, but even then you will be struggling to get a good signal and your conversation will blip in and out making it hard to for whom ever is listening to understand you.

Good for the price, but definitely not trouble-free
It is what it is: an $18 phone. Calls and texting do work, battery life is good.In more detail:- The battery lasts for about a month (I’ve only charged it twice as of now) if you don’t use it much. However, it died kind of unexpectedly after showing 75-100% battery level most of the time. Oh well. The fact that this phone charges via regular micro USB makes it easy to use with my portable power bank which I always carry anyway.- Multimedia functions are there, but who would use them in a phone like this? Without a memory card it can literally store only one 160x120pxphoto.- The radio works OK with no headphones, which is somewhat amazing and might actually be useful. Like when you’re travelling by bicycle and see a sign like “Tune to 100.0 FM for info on fog and vicious zombies ahead”. You might have some better uses for it, though.- The phone doesn’t seem to be able to import contacts which are not stored on a SIM card. Connecting to PC doesn’t help with that either. Now this is actually a shortcoming even for the simplest device IMO.- Lack of a good manual makes it hard to learn doing even the simplest of things like locking keypad.- The phone only supports English, Spanish and Portuguese. It was an unpleasant surprise to see incoming Russian (300 million speakers anyone?) SMS as a bunch of squares. Well yeah, it’s my fault, I should’ve looked at reviews first. But then again is it that hard to make the phone support Unicode?- Finally, the design is actually nice enough for everyday use.All-in-all I would recommend this as the cheap phone-to-go for any North/South American user

Great phone based on first impressions
I just got this phone and this review is based on my first impressions. This phone gives you a lot for the money. You cannot compare it to the Nokia phones at the same price range. The software/screen/extras are way better. FM radio is a blast! Very clear even without any external headset. In contrast, my new Moto G 2015 does not give you this good reception without a headset. Display is very nice – big, bright, smooth and colorful . Navigation is quite intuitive after 5 minutes playing with the phone. Performance is good. I cannot comment on its call performance since I am only using it with an international sim to receive text messages. The cover is very easy to remove but I found the battery pretty hard to remove. The manual does not indicate how to load the SIM though there is impression embedded near the SIM card compartment. I used a video on YouTube to confirm that I was doing it correctly. Hint – Insert the first sim all the way in until it is flush with the border. Link to video – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B7nqUw0g7QMI think the phone back could be more textured to give a better grip.

It doesn’t specify that it doesn’t work in Australia. Even though we use the GSM network. Its a shame cause ohine looked goid too.

I bought this telephone because I wanted a good old feature phone with Bluetooth support and a good battery life, but didn’t want to pay a fortune for it. On those criteria, I’m entirely satisfied. I’ve used it with Primus Wireless (Rogers network) all over Quebec and New Brunswick, and have found no problem at all: wherever other Rogers users have access to a network, so do I. I don’t get domestic roaming, but I’m not sure if that’s because of the phone or of my operator. (Do note that it is a 2G phone and so it will stop working when the 2G network is disconnected, which will probably happen sometime between 2015 and 2018.)This phone simultaneously feels cheap but very sturdy: I’m under the impression that I could drop it on the floor quite a few times and it wouldn’t be a problem. It’s not really heavier than my old Nokia 1209, and has a great battery life: I charge it about once a week, which represents maybe 10 hours of talk time and 158 hours of standby time.On the down side, the sound quality is not great. The microphone is okay: when used in an environment that is not too noisy, my wife has confirmed that she hears me just as well as when we’re using the landline. But the speaker is really crappy, and I usually have to remain very concentrated to understand what my correspondent says.The “software” is not as good as that of the previous feature phones I’ve owned (a Siemens then a Nokia), and is sometimes difficult to use, especially so as there is almost no information in the manual or on Blu’s website. (The website actually doesn’t even acknowledge that this model exists!) Thankfully I was able to find a webpage with some useful information, such as the key combinations to lock and unlock the screen: http://www.leighb.com/JennyGuide.htm. In case that’s relevant for you, I’ve noticed that there is no option to use it in French.It’s also difficult to open the cover to access the battery, SIM cards and microSD card, and it’s even more difficult to close it correctly.I have not tested the other features (camera, media player, etc.), but they exist in case anyone would need them. You would need to buy a microSD card though, because this phone doesn’t come with one and doesn’t have enough memory available to take even one photograph.BLUETOOTH UPDATE: I mentionned that Bluetooth support was a factor in choosing this phone, but I wasn’t able to test it before I got my new car this week. Bluetooth does work, but the support is very minimal: the telephone doesn’t support uploading my contacts and call history to the car, and I have to push a button to confirm the connection whenever I’ve shut down the car engine and turn it on again.BATTERY UPDATE AFTER FOUR MONTHS: I’m still charging the battery once a week, talking on the phone about two hours per day on average. After four months of use, the battery is still able to keep my phone working for this long, but I think it won’t be able to do so for much longer, since when I plug it now it’s down to “zero bar” already.SIM UPDATE: It seems like some other reviewers have trouble using this telephone with their SIM card. I wonder if this is because they have a micro-SIM and don’t realise it because they’ve never seen a larger one. You do need a mini, 2FF SIM to use this phone. If you’re stuck with a smaller one, you’ll need to get an adaptor. When you subscribe with a new operator, you can normally ask for a mini-size SIM—it should be the largest size available, full-size SIMs aren’t made anymore AFAIK—or, better yet, you can sometimes ask for a mini that can be tore down to a micro for your next phone.