The first U.S. smartphone from prominent Chinese phone maker Coolpad shows that the company has a ways to go before it can compete with top manufacturers like LG and Samsung here in the states. The Coolpad Quattro 4G gives you a 4-inch, 800-by-480 screen for $99, and since it's on MetroPCS, you don't even need to sign a contract. Its performance is slow enough, though, that we can't recommend it.

Physical Features and Call Quality

A clunky phone at 5 by 2.6 by 0.5 inches, the Quattro 4G is relatively light at 3.3 ounces. A few years ago, this would have been considered a decent size, but now it's thick for a slab-style phone without a sliding keyboard. The front is dominated by the 4-inch, 800-by-480-pixel touch screen, which is a workaday LCD panel that looks washed out compared with the screens on the LG Motion 4G and LG Connect 4G . The silver plastic back has an interesting texture, and parts of the phone's back are patterned, while other parts are flat.

The Quattro connects to MetroPCS's 4G LTE network in 14 metro areas, to 2G CDMA outside those areas, and to Wi-Fi on the 2.4GHz band where it's available. One of MetroPCS's coolest features is its Easy WiFi client, which automatically hooks up to public hotspots. Alas, you can't make phone calls over Wi-Fi the way you can with T-Mobile phones. Speeds on the MetroPCS LTE network were solid, showing 4-6Mbps down.

The carrier is currently running an excellent promotion with unlimited talk, text, and data for $55 per month with no contract. That doesn't include use of the Quattro 4G's Wi-Fi hotspot or tethered modem modes, though; if you want to use the Quattro to connect other devices, you need to sign up for a limited plan starting at $50 for 2.5GB.

Call quality is adequate, but not great. While reception and data speeds were just short of the excellent results we saw on the LG Motion 4G, calls were quieter and sounded a bit more muddled in the earpiece. Transmission through the mic, on the other hand, sounded great on the other end, even muting the sound of a jackhammer in the background without any effect on my voice. The speakerphone is of average volume and sounds a bit scratchy. While the Quattro connected to my Jawbone Era headset  without a problem, it couldn't trigger voice dialing over Bluetooth.

Battery life was disappointing at 4 hours, 43 minutes of talk time on the 1600mAh battery. There also may be a bug in the charging meter; the phone said it charged from zero to 42 percent in 20 minutes, which is pretty swift.

Android, Apps, and Performance

Coolpad isn't using a cheapo processor here; it's a TI OMAP3 clocked at 1GHz. That's the same processor, and the same speed, used in 2010's Motorola Droid 2. But performance here in actual use is just dog-awful, especially if you're multitasking anything. It's worse than the benchmarks imply, on par with the Huawei Activa 4G and ZTE Score M , two other phones we don't recommend.

Major performance issues seem to come into play when the phone tries to multitask. I experienced way too many delays in the overwrought custom keyboard/handwriting recognition app, including dropping a lot of characters. I even saw delays on the unlock screen. When your competition is the sprightly LG Motion 4G, this kind of molasses-slowness just isn't acceptable.

The Quattro runs Android 2.3 (the Motion 4G has 4.0), and you shouldn't expect an upgrade. There's just too little RAM in this phone, only 512MB. Speaking of storage, it's a good thing there's a 2GB MicroSD card in here, as there's only 109MB of free on-board memory. I managed to get a 16GB MicroSD card to load up, but not larger cards.

Along with apps you can download from the Google Play app store, the Quattro is stuffed full of MetroPCS bloatware. The Rhapsody $10-a-month unlimited streaming music service is useful, but most of the bloat is less so: The hideous MetroXtras, which gives you pop-up ads on your phone, qualifies for worst.

Multimedia and Conclusions

The Quattro 4G is an adequate music player, but doesn't do well as a video player or camera. The limited internal memory is an issue. Beyond that, we saw strange video artifacts (skipped or blank lines) in one of our H.264-formatted MP4 files. The Quattro 4G plays all the usual music formats and MP4, H.264, and WMV videos at up to 720p resolution; it can't handle DivX. In my tests, audio through headphones was clear, at least.

Photos taken with the Quattro's 3.2-megapixel camera showed a red cast outdoors, and a bright background overwhelmed an image of leaves in front of the sky. Indoors, the white balance recovered but photos looked a bit smeared—not from focus problems, but from a soft lens. Video recording captures only 640-by-480 at 12 frames per second in low light, and 20 frames per second in good light. Shutter delay was acceptable but noticeable at 0.7 second, so you'll lose the occasional fast-moving subject. There's also a very basic VGA camera on the front. It's safe to say the LG Motion 4G outpaces the Quattro in every one of these areas.

When I spoke with the president of Coolpad Americas, he said the company wanted to make sure its radios were reliable when it entered the U.S. market. Mission accomplished. But when you're going up against an established leader like LG, you need an Android phone that emails, texts, and runs 400,000 apps well. So far in MetroPCS's lineup, Huawei, ZTE, and Coolpad have all missed the mark there.

MetroPCS has terrific no-contract plans and a steadily improving 4G LTE network. We enthusiastically recommend the LG Motion 4G if you're on a budget, and the Editors' Choice LG Connect 4G if you can spend a bit more. Coolpad may yet release a great phone (just as Huawei did with the excellent Mercury on Cricket), but the Quattro 4G isn't it. Give it a pass.

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