Itel S18 – Better from Itel

Itel has announced the Itel S18, their “flagship” phone for the year 2022. Well technically, a company’s best phone is its flagship, so there.

Itel is actually amongst the 10 biggest smartphone brands in Africa. The video with the third highest views on my YouTube channel is the Itel S17 video, Itel’s flagship for last year.

There’s no major town in West Africa that you’ll travel to and not see a big Itel advert welcoming or bidding you goodbye.

The company has had quite a bit of success and seeks to improve on last year’s offering. Itel is advertising the Itel S18 series as a phone made for selfie vloggers. Is this true?

So let’s see what Itel brings to the table.

Itel S18 specs

• Body: plastic frame and back cover
• SoC: Unisoc SC9863A (28nm)
• GPU: Power VR IMG8322
• Software: Android 11 Go
• RAM: LPDDR4x (2GB)
• Storage: eMMC 5.1 (64GB)
• Display: 6.6″ HD (720p) IPS-LCD, 270 ppi, 400 nits
• Cameras: 8MP + 2MP + 0.3MP
• Selfie: 8MP
• Video: 720p@30fps
• Battery: 5,000mAh
• Connectivity: 3G, 4G LTE, Dual SIM, Bluetooth 4.2, Wifi 5, USB 2.0, 3.5mm audio jack, micro USB
• Sensors: proximity, light, accelerometer
• Price: 63,000NGN

Body

Plastic. A plastic phone through and through.

Performance

The Itel S18 uses a Unisoc SC9863A SoC with a Power VR IMG8322 GPU. This SoC is a budget SoC from 2018.

The Unisoc SC9863A houses 8 Cortex A55 CPUs and runs at a max speed of 1.6GHz. It uses a 28nm process from SMIC. This SC9863A is an entry-level SoC that can be found on phones like the Samsung A03 core for example.

In terms of performance output, despite being an octa-core SoC, it is more at the level of SoCs like the Snapdragon 625, Helio G25, and of course Helio A22.

It is only meant for light use. This phone will carry the user for social media, multimedia, and very light games. Anything else is just pushing it.

It is what it is tho. Theoretically speaking, the Unisoc SC9863A is supposed to be on the level of the Helio G35 and G37, but that 28nm fab process is holding it back. How?

Well, the SoC gets hot fast, really fast. So it’s going to throttle performance quickly to stay a bit cooler. As a result, its ability to do stuff will be severely limited.

The SC9863A is an Octa-core SoC with 8 A55 CPU cores. Not 4, 8! Yet it’s only 14% better than the Helio A22 with 4 A53 CPUs.

RAM and Storage

For storage, the phone has 2GB of LPDDR4x RAM and 64GB of eMMC 5.1 storage. Itel has also added 2GB of virtual memory to the RAM but that’s a cheap gimmick.

Display

As usual with Itel phones, this one has a big 6.6″ 720P (HD) LCD with a pixel density of 270ppi and a brightness of 400nit.

Cameras

There are three cameras here on this device. The first is an 8MP main camera, the second is a 2MP depth sensor and the last one is a 0.3MP QVGA camera.

As far as I’m concerned, there’s only one camera on the back of this phone. The rest two are pointless.

There’s also an 8MP camera at the front of this device for selfies.

This device as is expected, records videos of 720p @30fps for both front and main cameras. This device is not a vlogging device because 720p videos from an 8MP camera on an SoC with no ISP will look bad.

Battery

The S18 is powered by a 5,000mAh battery that supports 10W charge. This one will take quite a while to charge fully.

Software

It appears that Itel is sticking with last year’s Android 11 Go for this one.

Conclusion

So this phone is entry-level, is it any good? Well, that depends on what you intend to use it for.

If you plan to use it for communication, calls, social media, multimedia, light games, as a second phone, etc. then yes, this is an okay phone.

On the other hand, if you are looking for a main phone to do Snapchat videos or to play games like PUBG and eFootball, then no. It’s a hard pass for this one. You’ll need to up your budget and look elsewhere.

This phone costs 62,500 NGN which quite frankly is a lot of money to throw away. The Redmi A1 costs less but everyone should make their choice as they see fit.

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