China's Smartisan T2 flaunts a sleek design and metal frame

Reasonably priced Chinese smartphones with decent specifications are a dime a dozen these days, but you still have to look to the top tier OEMs for the best build quality. Smartisan’s new T2 flagship aims to buck this trend with a metallic frame and a rather sleek, minimalistic look.

The T2 arrives 19 months after Smartisan’s T1 début and takes on quite a different design. There’s an all new seamless aluminium frame, a complete absence of a power button, no visible SIM tray and no bulging camera module or other protruding parts to ruin the look. There are some clever bits of design too. The nano SIM tray is hidden behind the right set of volume keys and pops out if you poke the nearby hole. Power is now controlled completely from the home button too.

The range of customization options is also quite impressive. The left and right volume rockers can be switched between brightness and audio depending on if you’re left or right handed. There are also three customizable buttons at the bottom of the phone, including the home button, which can be assigned various shortcuts.

In terms of hardware, the Smartisan T2 is perhaps a little more standard. The devices features a 5-inch 1080p LCD display and is powered by a hexa-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 808 processor. There’s 3GB of LPDDR3 RAM on board, 16GB or 32GB of internal memory to choose from but no microSD card slot, and a 13 megapixel rear camera 5 megapixel front camera combination. The phone also features a USB Type-C connector and the company’s Smartisan OS 2.5 based on Android 5.1 Lollipop.

The Smartisan T2 is not the cheapest Chinese handset with its 2,499 Yuan ($385) price tag for the 16GB version and 2,599 Yuan ($400) cost for 32GB of storage, but is still very reasonable given the design and hardware. There’s no word yet on whether the T2 will ever retail outside of China, but the company is planning to expand later in the year. Hopefully some importers will pick it up.