The Wiko Robby is many things in one. It is very affordable, at Kshs 11,000, stylish and good-looking and runs one of the most recent versions of Android, Marshmallow.
That is not all, though, there are some other things it does so well and features that would resonate with the kind of customer Wiko is targeting with the device.
1. Dual Front-Facing Speakers
You can’t miss them. They are there for everyone to see with nice little dots at the very top and bottom of the device’s 5.5-inch display.
2. Audio Focus
Naturally, such prominently-placed speakers can only mean one thing: that the device is definitely tuned to produce better sound and as such, appeal to music heads at the lower market segment. The speakers which also have 3D surround sound, won’t be the loudest in the room but they do try to get the specific tones and when you hold the device when playing music, you can tell that some thought went into them.
3. Dual Microphones
Tucked away and lost in the meelee that is the hard-to-figure convergence between the speakers, the earpiece and the microphone thanks to the Wiko Robby’s design, are two microphones, one at the top and another at the bottom of the device. This can only mean one thing…
4. You can hold/use it either way
It does not matter if you hold the Wiko Robby upright or upside down, it’s been tuned to behave exactly the same regardless of how you hold or use it. Thanks to the dual microphones, you can receive and make calls when holding the device upside down. The software is tuned to play nicely either way by exploiting the capabilities of one of the device’s sensors, the G sensor.
5. Smart Gestures
You can draw an O to launch the camera, an M to launch the music application and a C to open the phone app and make a call straight away when the Wiko Robby is in its sleep state. Now, this is not something out of the ordinary, we’ve seen it on other devices but here’s where it gets sweeter, you can create your own gestures and they’ll work just like the preset ones.
Oh, and a three finger down swipe on the screen results in a screenshot being taken. Once that has happened, you can swipe up on the screen to save the screenshot or swipe down to discard it. That seems like a lot of work but it works.
Bonus
Adoptable Storage
One of the understated features of Android 6.0 Marshmallow is something called Adoptable storage. This simply refers to the ability to set a memory card as an extension of the device’s onboard storage complete with the ability to install applications and games on it.
The Wiko Robby does support Adoptable storage as we gladly found out.
Since users will be limited to 16GB internally, they can insert a microSD card (up to 64GB as far as we know) to take advantage of this. The only downside? Once a microSD card has been committed, it is specially formatted, encrypted and mounted as part of the system and can no longer be put to use elsewhere.
