JCB Toughphone E10 review: This rugged phone has the raw performance of an abandoned bulldozer, but the price tag of something much better

JCB Toughphone E10: 30-second review

First, let’s clear up the JCB angle. JCB, the well-known digger company, does not make phones. The brand is operated by a company called JCB Phone, which was formed by the Genuine Case Company and has been licensed to use the JCB name since 2023. So what you’re buying with the JCB Toughphone E10 is a Chinese ODM phone wearing a very well-known British industrial badge, sold through a UK company that holds the licence.

That might be irrelevant to the potential purchaser, but I’m a details guy.

Other than the not-so-subtle rebranding, what we have here is a ruggedised, low-specification Android 15 phone that uses a MediaTek Helio G36 SoC, comes with 4GB of RAM, and only 64GB of storage. But you can expand storage with a MicroSD card up to 512GB.

The G36 uses 2023 SoC technology, but it’s derived from the P35, which appeared first in 2018. As a result, this phone is only 4G, and the Wi-Fi onboard is Wi-Fi 5. It has dual rear cameras, with a 50MP main sensor and an 8MP infrared night-vision camera.

In short, the specifications here are mostly those of an entry-level phone from about four years ago, with the possible exception of the camera. And for this, and the JCB logo, the makers are asking £300. At least twice what most rugged brands have as their starting point for a machine with a much better spec.

Unsurprisingly, based purely on value for money, the Toughphone E10 won’t be included in our guide to the best rugged phones.

JCB Toughphone E10: price and availability

• How much does it cost? £300
• When is it out? Available in the UK
• Where can you get it? You can get it directly from JCB Phone or on Amazon.co.uk.

One slight oddity with this phone and others in its series, it appears JCB Phone can’t get its ducks in order regarding what they call their products. On the website, this phone is the Toughphone E10, but on the box it came in, it’s labelled as the Tough Phone E10.

Whatever pseudonym it prefers, the E10 is available for £300 on JCB’s website, and £290 at Amazon. I did notice that for a short period, it is sold for £265 on Amazon, so if you do insist on buying one, it might be worth waiting till it drops again.

So, how does the price of this phone compare with other rugged phones? Badly.

For £269.99, the Ulefone Armor X16 offers 5G, 16GB of RAM and 256GB of storage. But it also uses a Dimensity 6300 SoC, has better cameras and a much larger battery.

Choosing another brand, Blackview offers something similar in the BL7000 for £279.99.

Those who want a lower specification phone closer to the E10, for whatever reason, might consider the Ulefone Armor X12, which has 6GB of RAM, 256GB of storage, and a 13MP main camera. It sells for £99.99, allowing you to buy three for the MSRP cost of the E10.

Looking back at the rugged phones I’ve reviewed, the last phone I covered that was this underpowered was the Ulefone Armor 16 Pro, a device that, while not officially discontinued, is difficult to source these days.

Therefore, as a value proposition, the E10 was buried deep using a backhoe loader just after midnight.

• Value score: 1/5

JCB Toughphone E10: Specs

JCB Toughphone E10: Design

• Pocket-friendly
• Not IP68
• Awkward IPS display
• No wireless charging

Picking this phone up for the first time, it reminded me of the Doogee Fire 6. As rugged phones go, at just 276g and dimensions of only 170 x 80 x 12mm, this is an easily pocketable design that isn’t substantially bigger or heavier than a typical smartphone.

It’s relatively flat, has the JCB logo emblazoned on the back, though disappointingly not in yellow, and it has a de facto button arrangement.

As JCB Phone is a branding company, this phone was undoubtedly made in Shenzen, and is probably based on a chassis and internals that were originally made for a Chinese product.

The only feature that struck me as slightly off the well-worn path was that neither the 3.5mm audio jack nor the USB-C port had a rubber plug protecting them from water and dust ingress.

Digging deeper into the published specifications, I noticed that while this phone is IP69K-rated. That means it can handle being rained on and maybe jet-washing, it’s not IP68. Therefore, it can’t handle being submerged, which rugged phones often can do.

Since I’ve seen enough videos of people taking heavy construction equipment into water, perhaps that was an oversight.

Another curious aspect of this phone is the 6.6-inch IPS panel with the truly odd resolution of 720 x 1612 pixels. That resolution means that any video played back on this phone will be downsampled to 720p, even if it’s 1080p content that the phone actually recorded.

This isn’t a great screen, because if you are not within five degrees of perpendicular, the brightness of the display significantly reduces. Some phones have this ‘feature’ by design as a security measure, but I suspect that this one merely has a display that doesn’t work well at angles. The glass on the screen is also not textured in any way, and therefore, it’s often impacted by reflections when outdoors.

Overall, there isn’t anything remarkable about this phone, unless you count the letters J, C and B on the back as having mystical significance. But, with the possible exception of the screen, it’s an unexciting but functional rugged design for those who remain above water.

Design score: 3/5

JCB Toughphone E10: Hardware

• Mediatek G36
• Limited RAM and storage
• 6500 mAh battery

Before I started looking into the hardware, I’d already noticed that this phone isn’t the most responsive Android phone I’ve ever tested.

When I revealed the architecture used, my experiences lined up those dots disturbingly well.

This phone uses the MediaTek Helio G36, a revamp of the 2016 P35 that MediaTek launched in 2023. Therefore, the technology in it is ten years old at worst, and it was fabricated using 12nm FinFETs, placing this chip long before today’s 6nm, 4nm, and 3nm SoCs.

As SoCs go, this is a remarkably straightforward design that uses eight of the same ARM Cortex-A53 cores, but in two banks, half clocked up to 2.2GHz and the other four at 1.6GHz. The limitations it applies to the phone are that it only supports 4G LTE comms, dual-band Wi-Fi 5, Bluetooth 5.0, cameras can’t be better than 50MP and HD+ resolution displays.

It’s less restricted in memory and storage than this design might imply, as it can address up to 8GB of LPDDR4X RAM (1600MHz) and 128GB of eMMC 5.1 storage.

So the 4GB of actual memory and 64GB of storage were constraints applied by the makers.

The amount of RAM was so low that I checked whether it was enough to run Android 15, and technically, it is for the standard distribution. But it’s the bottom rung, and this phone will never be upgraded to Android 16 because the only way that would work is if the OS were replaced with a stripped-down release known as the Android Go Edition.

Equally, the last phone I had that actually ran out of storage was an HTC, and when I’d installed my standard benchmarks on the E10, I’d eaten about half the 64GB in this design. You can add a MicroSD card, at extra expense, but in 2026, a phone should come with at least 128GB or ideally 256GB out of the box.

The last subject in this section is the battery, rated at 6500mAh. It’s not massive, but I’ve seen less. At least being modest in this facility has made the phone light and easy to carry.

Unlike most Chinese rugged phones, the E10 didn’t come with a fast charger, and when I hooked it up to one of my UGREEN power packs, it pulled a maximum of 15W. That’s a level that many phones can charge over wireless. There is no wireless charging on this phone, even if the flat underside would be perfect for that technology.

That it can’t charge faster isn’t a huge deal, since even with 15W, the battery can be fully recharged in relatively short order.

With such a modest specification, it was probably a mistake to put Android 15 on this phone, it might have seemed more responsive with Android 13.

• Hardware score: 2/5

JCB Toughphone E10: Cameras

• 50MP and 8MP on the rear
• 8MP on the front
• Three cameras in total

The JCB Toughphone E10 has three cameras:

Rear camera: 50.3MP GalaxyCore GC50e0, 8MP Omnivision OV08d10 (Night Vision)
Front camera: 8MP GalaxyCore GC08A3

Obviously, for someone working in the construction industry, there are those times when you need to document how that unrelated wall was accidentally knocked down, or your digger blade went through a mains cable. And, the E10 is ready to help with that.

The 50.3MP GalaxyCore GC50e0 sensor isn’t the best camera I’ve seen on a rugged phone, but it can take a reasonably detailed and balanced shot with sufficient light.

Where it’s less wonderful is when there isn’t bright sunlight, where things become distinctly grainy and muddy quickly. Thankfully, then you can fall back on the 8MP Omnivision OV08d10 for some sharper night vision shots if you don’t need colour.

There are a few special shooting modes that include Panorama, Slow Motion and Time Lapse, along with a Pro mode for complete control.

The primary camera lacks optics that allow anything beyond digital zoom, and in both still images and video, the 50MP sensor is never used to provide shake compensation.

Considering the 64GB of storage the phone comes with, the tactical decision was made when this phone was designed to offer only 1080p video as the maximum resolution.

Typically, in my phone reviews, I usually complain if the makers don’t offer Widevine L1 encryption so that streaming services can be used at a decent resolution. But in this case, the screen doesn’t allow for anything better than 720p, so that it only supports Widevine L3 is a little less of a disappointment.

Overall, the main sensor is useful on a sunny day and for indoor night vision, but this isn’t a phone that I’d give to anyone wanting to document events to the highest standard.

JCB Toughphone E10 Camera samples

• Camera score: 2.5/5

JCB Toughphone E10: Performance

• Battery-efficient SoC
• Dire CPU and GPU results

As a point of reference, I usually put a phone alongside the review device to get some perspective, using a phone that’s a similar price or uses the same platform.

In this instance, I’ve not done that for two reasons.

The first is that this is the only phone that I’ve seen blessed with the Helio G36 SoC, and also, I could find almost no phones that perform this badly in these tests.

Even the Blackview BV7300, which used the G81 SoC has a quicker CPU than the E10, scoring 446 for Geekbench Single test, and 1446 for the Multi.

For whatever reason, Geekbench didn’t consider the PowerVR Rogue GE8320 to have the right stuff for OpenGL testing, and the Vulkan score was dire. This set something of a theme, where various benchmarks, like 3DMark Nomad Lite, refused to run either because of the GPU specs or because there was insufficient RAM.

And incidentally, I’ve not seen a PCMark score that low since the Ulefone Armour 15, a 2022 era phone that used the G35, a brother of the SoC in the E10.

I won’t continue sticking pins in the E10 any more than is necessary. It’s a phone that isn’t for anyone who games, expects rapid responses, or likes to load lots of apps.

• Performance score: 1/5

JCB Toughphone E10: Final verdict

Before I excavate the value in the JCB Toughphone E10, I’m going to call out the makers for some things on their website that aren’t good representations of the product they’re selling.

I noticed numerous errors and omissions in the product page that included calling Android 15 the ‘latest OS’ when Android 16 is out, and that version launched in 2024. Or saying it has 8GB of RAM, and then in brackets, ‘inc. 4GB virtual’. So, it has 4GB memory, then.

It also claims to have, ‘Dual SIM + eSIM’. This is not the case; instead, it has a single SIM and eSIM, as the tray doesn’t support swapping the MicroSD for another SIM.

But the part I most disliked was that in the FAQ to the question ‘Will the E10 keep getting Android updates’, the official answer was this:

“The E10 ships with Android 15 and receives security updates through Google Play services. If a specific major Android version update roadmap is critical for your use case, contact our UK support team before buying and we’ll confirm the current position from the manufacturer.”

Not only does that entirely fail to give the correct answer, saying when updates will be supported until. But it also fails to mention that this phone will never be upgraded to Android 16 or 17 due to limitations imposed by the hardware specifications. It’s not like those things can change, so asking people to contact the support team is merely a distraction.

Before JCB Phone and I take any more of your valuable time, let’s break down what’s good and bad about the E10.

In the good corner, this is a lightweight device that’s easy to carry, has enough battery for a couple of days’ use, has an eSIM and is well-made.

Conversely, it’s more than twice the price of what the hardware alone might reasonably justify, the specifications are potentially a rung below entry-level, the primary camera only works well in good lighting, there isn’t enough RAM or storage for many users, and it isn’t IP68-rated.

Those wanting a JCB-branded phone will find that it comes with enough caveats to fill a local landfill, and there are dozens of better devices for this money that one might recommend.

Should I buy a JCB Toughphone E10?

Buy it if…

Don’t buy it if…

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