Teracube is a small company that you might not have heard of. They’re focused very heavily on creating smartphones that environmental impact first, and that’s what got us excited to try out the Teracube 2e.
The second-generation device from the eco-friendly company doesn’t promise insane specs or anything, but it is easily repairable, has a swappable battery, and comes in biodegradable packaging. It’s all cool on paper, so let’s dig in and see how it really works.
Design
- Basic design
- Removable battery
- Surprising build quality
For better or worse, the Teracube 2e won’t be winning any design awards. It’s a pretty basic smartphone with a small notch, all your necessary buttons, and a dual-camera module on the back. The fingerprint scanner sits back there, too.
There’s very little to write home about. The green power button is a nice touch, and you still get a headphone jack up top, which is great in 2021. There’s an LED light for notifications on the front, which seems increasingly rare these days. But one thing the Teracube 2e can do that your Galaxy S21 can’t? You can swap the battery out.
Yep. That might not seem like a huge deal anymore, but ask someone that lived through the initial era of smartphones (or even regular phones!) about how useful that was. You can just swap in a second battery to get right back to 100% charge, and no fast charging setup can ever beat that. You can also swap in a healthy battery in a couple years whenever the factory one decides to call it quits instead of paying someone else to repair it for you, and that really ties into Teracube’s messaging behind this product.
Display and audio
- Bright display
- Poor motion blurring
- Decent speakers
At $199, you have to keep all things in perspective. Unfortunately, it’s hard not to be a little disappointed in the screen quality that you get out of the Teracube 2e.
It’s not terrible by any stretch. It’s a decently bright screen with solid color reproduction, and handles stuff like YouTube or movies well enough. You’ll notice some blurring while swiping through home screens or lists quickly, however, and that can be a rough experience with heavy web browsing or fast-paced gaming. Nothing deal breaking, but we’ve seen phones in similar price points do a better job.
The speakers are pretty decent, and fall in line almost exactly where you’d expect them to with a $200 phone. They’re loud enough and clear enough to get you through your basic media experiences, but you’ll want a Bluetooth speaker or some good headphones if you’re planning on binging movies on a slow afternoon.
Gaming and performance
- Solid, consistent performance
- Unbloated experience
While the display might not be perfect, the Teracube does do a decent enough job with its octa-core MediaTek CPU. While it’s not the fastest chip around, it is pretty consistent and generally responsive. Checking out websites, clearing out my emails, and listening to music were just fine. The 4GB of RAM is more than enough to keep things in memory so you can take a break from your game without it being closed in the background, assuming you don’t get too crazy. I was actually able to bounce back and forth between Call of Duty: Mobile and Retro Bowl without either having to reload, which was nice.
You won’t be playing anything at ultra high settings, but Android’s optimized enough these days that even these budget-friendly devices can do a pretty good job of delivering a fun gaming experience without putting off tons of heat or costing a thousand bucks.
Plug some headphones in, connect a controller, and you can actually turn this into a pretty serious gaming device, especially with emulators. Serious multitasking and video editing might be out of reach, but how many people are actually needing that here, anyway?
Battery and charging
- No fast charging
- Decent battery life
- Removable battery
The Teracube 2e comes with a 4000mAh battery. That’s very decently sized, even in the era of larger-than-ever batteries, and it manages to hold up pretty well throughout an entire day’s use. Heavy gaming or too much YouTube might trip you up, but generally you won’t need to search for a charger too often.
Where the phone really shines is its removable battery, though, which means you can go completely 2012 and just carry an extra battery to switch out whenever your phone does die. No need for a bulky external battery or cables or wall plugs, just swap and go.
This means the Teracube 2e actually has simultaneously the fastest and slowing charging of any phone I’ve used this year; it doesn’t support fast charging, so you’ll need to buckle in and actually wait for your wall block to juice up the battery. But being able to grab a 100% charged battery from your pocket solves this in a throwback way.
Vanilla Android
- Nearly stock Android
- No carrier or OEM bloatware
Teracube has done basically nothing to Android aside from getting it to run on their hardware. Seriously, it’s vanilla.
You’re getting all of the default Android icons and apps, plus Google’s suite of Photos, Gmail, YouTube, and whatever else they throw in. The phone has 64GB of internal storage, and you actually get almost all of that to use right out of the box.
There’s no Teracube-specific apps, preloaded games from Verizon, or weird duplicates for stock services anymore. Just plain old Android for you to customize and tweak to your own liking. That might be a stark contrast to companies like Samsung that try to sell on software features, but it’s nice to see someone realizing that Android’s pretty decent on its own.
If you’re a fan of those features, though, this phone might seem bland. Even Motorola bakes in a few extra things on their phones to make them feel someone unique, but Teracube hasn’t even taken that approach.
Camera
- Dual cameras
- Passable performance
The Teracube 2e utilizes a dual-camera setup with a 13MP sensor paired with an 8MP lens. It covers all the basics that you’d want from a phone, including ultra wide angle shots, HDR photography, a beauty mode and a manual professional mode, and basic video recording.
It’s fine. It’s not particularly quick to snap, but as long as you’re not shooting fast action shots you can get pretty good pictures in good lighting.
Low light is a struggle. The dedicated low light mode does help, but I don’t think phone will be the go-to for group photos in a bar or outside in the dark.
Worth it?
- Paying for environmental friendliness
- Decent phone
- Well supported from Teracube
Is the Teracube 2e a good phone for $199? Well, mostly.
For your money I do think you can probably score something that’s a little bit better in the same price ranges, not even counting sales and deals. Camera performance is just okay, and there’s no killer feature here to really set the Teracube 2e apart.
But the package as a whole is definitely worth looking at, and if you’re reading this review and considering the phone, you probably already knew that. You’ll get a phone with biodegradable packaging, with a removable battery that you can service yourself, and with a customer support team behind it that’s legitimately committed to fixing your phone if something happens. It’s not an impossible to repair device that ends up in a landfill after a couple years, and that’s a very respectable goal.
There are some compromises, but if you’re looking for a phone that you can genuinely feel like you own, this is it. It’s fully unlocked, works on a ton of carriers around the world, and you can take repairs into your own hands. You’ll actually be able to keep this working for several years without being at the mercy of an OEM that’s only interested in selling the next big thing.
If nothing else, Teracube can teach some other phone manufacturers a few good habits, both for consumers and the environment.
Teracube 2e | $199 | My Teracube
