A review of the $10 Walmart phone—better than nothing, but not by much

We traded the thing on the left for the thing on the right. And yes the display really looks that bad in real life.

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The other day we were rather shocked to hear that Walmart was selling a pre-paid smartphone for ten whole dollars. When we saw the device was running Android, we just had to see what it was like. So we walked into our local store, plunked an entire $10 bill down on the table, and walked out with a rough facsimile of a smartphone. Meet the LG Sunrise.

This is not our first trip into the masochistic world of ultra-cheap smartphones. We previously reviewed the Intex Cloud FX, a $35 smartphone that ran Firefox OS. The Cloud FX had a ton of problems, but for us the most limiting thing was FireFox OS. It couldn't run any benchmarks or our battery tests, making the device a $35 slab of uselessness that could occasionally render a webpage without crashing. The Sunrise is packing something much more familiar though: Android. It's only running Android 4.4 KitKat, but that's a lot better than Mozilla's app-less browser OS.

We should mention that while we walked into a Walmart and spent only $10 on this device, it was on sale. Various carrier models have the MSRP of the Sunrise listed for $40-$60. We should also mention that this $10 deal is for a locked prepaid phone. If you want to have cell service on this device, it has to be with TracFone unless you want to unlock it somehow. You could also just never get service and have a $10 Wi-Fi device.

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