Archos Diamond Omega review

Telephony

The phonebook is fairly standard, a part of the same multi-tabbed app as the dialer. You can assign personal ringtones for each contact and scan a business card to quickly add a new contact.

Phone app and contacts

The dialer shows your recent calls with the keypad on top (which can be hidden to make more room for the call log). Smart dialing is enabled - that is you can quickly search your contacts by typing - but the phone also pulls numbers for various shops and businesses from the Internet. The Info button next to each number shows more about that business.

Popping two SIM cards into the phone also gives you the appropriate options, like a second call button.

Loudspeaker

The Archos Diamond omega is stuck with a single speaker, just like the Nubia Z17. However, it is vastly improved, both in terms of quality and loudness.

The phone scored an "Excellent" rating in our tests, so you should have no problem with it, regardless of background noise level.

Messaging

Like the dialer, the messaging app lets you easily send a message from either SIM card. Once you open a message thread you also get a clear indication of which SIM card received a given text too. The app itself looks like it belongs on iOS; it has a fairly clean UI but it's functional.

Nubia Messages app

Multimedia attachment support is full-featured. No complaints there.

Text Input

Nothing extravagant here, just a basic GBoard install. Still, we're not complaining. Google's keyboard has really come a long way.

Not only can you do online searches on the spot, but there is also an extensive emoji library and GIF integration. Last, but not least, GBoard lends itself to customization - themes, colors, size, the works. And Google's predictive text algorithms are second to none.

Assorted apps

The Archos Diamond Omega is pretty light on the pre-loaded app package - definitely a plus in our book. Our past experience with Nubia UI has pretty much always been at the polar opposite end of the spectrum. We can only assume the Nubia Z17s variant of the handset won't be quite as clean. Not in its native Chinese market, at least. International Nubia ROMs should be fairly bloat-free as well.

Full Google app package • Nubia apps

Most basic features on the Archos are handled by a full Google app package. You pretty much get all the "Play" branded apps, as well as Chrome, Maps, Gmail, Drive and even the Duo chat app.

Beyond that, Nubia did include a few apps of its own as well. All of the basics are nicely covered. You get a Clock app, Calendar, File Browser, NotePad and an Audio Recorder.

Custom Nubia apps

Again, Nubia fans will likely notice some omissions from the typical Nubia list. The weather app, for one, has been removed. It never really functioned outside of China, so, we assume axing it was the easier approach. Still, we're not exactly sure why the simple, but functional flashlight app got the same treatment. We also miss the Projection app, which was a handy way to cast you device screen to multiple other smartphones for presentation or multimedia purposes.