EDIT: I was unaware of the issues of the Nexus 7. Seeing that they are not related to the phone's specs, my previous statements no longer hold.
Also, this has very similar specs to the 2012 Nexus 7 which is basically unusable with Android 5.1
Unusable meaning up to 20 seconds delay between a tap and the expected app opening up or the keyboard showing. Random hangs with the question if you want to kill the offending app.
I don't expect a $4 phone to be fast but unless there are some major differences, I think you'd just get $4 worth of frustration.
Interestingly, I have a $99 smartphone with quadcore 1.3GHz cpu, 1GB of RAM and a 720p 5" screen, and it works marvelously. No lag, keyboard works as it should, can play 1080p video without any issues, 2100mAh battery lasts for a day. I don't think that 2012 phones are the same as 2015/16 phones. As a x86 dual core 1.6GHz cpu from today and 4 years ago is not the same.
I had Moto G 2nd gen which is similar specs. Said I had, because it was so slow I couldn't use it at all.
So slow that calls would drop because phone app took 10sec to open.
Just to give a counter-anecdote: I still use a 1st gen Moto G. I previously had a mid-range HTC and a low-end Samsung phone. The Moto G is without doubt the best Android phone I owned so far.
I have Moto G 1st gen, and the phone app starts instantly, loads fully in around 1sec. You probably have some malware running, or forgot to close all the apps in the background.
I use the first Moto G LTE they came out with. (The specs really don't change much from phone to phone.) It works for me the only other phone I've used before it was a Galaxy S III US Version.
At first it had a horrible bug that unloaded apps all the time. I and many others assumed the 1GB of RAM was the culprit. It wasn't. Unfortunately, we had to wait for the Lollipop update for it to get fixed.
If it weren't for the firmware issues and the fact that they waited so long to fix it I would buy another Motorola/Lenovo phone to replace it. Since it broke sometime ago.
I agree that I am definitely not the target market.
However, if you constantly wonder if the thing is actually doing anything, if it registered your touches, apps disappearing because they were killed by the OS, the whole thing will just not be discoverable or learnable and will be discarded as not useful, even by people who never used another phone.
AFAIK your issues with the 2012 Nexus 7 are well known to be caused by the storage memory of the device, it degrades really rapidly. Upgrading to 5.1 just makes it more pronounced. Other devices of the same age don't suffer from it.
Yeah, supposedly there is something wrong with the flash controller. It doesn't do a good job of wear leveling, or has a buggy/slow implementation of garbage collection, or something in that vein.
I have a cheap Asus tablet with a quad core 1.3 ghz mediatek CPU and 1 gb of ram that is perfectly usable. It is not as smooth as my iPhone and there are delays but nothing like you describe.
My Nexus 7 (2012) was exactly the same... Lost my phone last week and needed a device to use in the meantime. Installed Cyanogenmod 12.1 on the Nexus and it's measures of magnitude better!
Also, this has very similar specs to the 2012 Nexus 7 which is basically unusable with Android 5.1
Unusable meaning up to 20 seconds delay between a tap and the expected app opening up or the keyboard showing. Random hangs with the question if you want to kill the offending app.
I don't expect a $4 phone to be fast but unless there are some major differences, I think you'd just get $4 worth of frustration.