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Elephone P8000 Review

2015-08-17
just as the flagship p7000 started shipping in late May elephone announced the p8 thousand a very similar phone with a few changes so now that the p8 thousand is available should you buy it this is Bailey Stein with Android authority and this is my full review of the elephone p2000 to use many of the design elements found on the p7 thousand and that's certainly not a bad thing the P 8000 is considerably substantial in the hand not only because of its heft at 205 grams but also because of its somewhat thicker profile of 10.1 millimetres and well some users may find this a bit disconcerting at least at first I'm thinking that the majority of users will gladly take the extra half for the larger 4000 milliamp hour battery more on that in a minute regardless it's immediately clear when picking up the p8 thousand that it means business and that's inflated by the phone's metal band in overall surprisingly premium build the plastic rear cover kind of looks like a carbon-fiber D brand skin and the Sham furred edges and subtle curve contribute to a very nice overall design while you can access the dual SIM card slots as well as a micro SD card slot the slot for removing the back cover is actually very thin and difficult to use without a sharp fingernail add some relatively strong clips and you can be left struggling to get the back cover off in addition to that the microUSB port isn't perfectly centered and while this complaint is admittedly nitpicky I could definitely see the imperfect placement bothering some users what's perhaps more annoying though is the black border around the display which appears to have been intended to obscure the actual bezel sides personally I'm not a fan of a look and I know many others aren't as well there is a 5 megapixel Samsung front facing camera on the top left of the device as well as 3 capacitive keys on the bottom menu home and back the home button is illuminated and if you're lucky it may also function as a notification LED allophones first batch of 5000 units do not include the LED however and elephone actually has a page on their website stating that they quote head to make a compromise in order to keep up with the man first batch buyers can request a discount on Ella phones next flagship the Ella phone bounty but there doesn't appear to be any other sort of compensation available the P 8000s 5.5 inch 1080p display looks great and has excellent color reproduction the color temperature seems neutral and the maximum brightness is fairly bright sunlight readability is still about average for the price and unlike on the P 7000 there's unfortunately no gorilla glass I'm most concerned with quality control however as I did have a few issues on my unit out of the box I noticed a line of LCD bright spots on the right side of the display a dead pixel near the bottom left corner and a bit of dust trapped between the LCD and digitizer these are issues that I can live with but it's alarming that there was this much oversight and quality control before shipping featuring the octa-core 64-bit mediatek mt6752 processor collect at one point three gigahertz the P 8000 is a capable performer while the processor may not be as powerful as the slightly older mt6752 the elephone still provides reasonably good performance I didn't have any issues using it day to day and I think that performance is good when you consider the price it also has a generous three gigabytes of RAM which should be enough for even heavy multitasking coupled with a male T 720 GPU the P 8000 is able to play virtually all casual games without any issues do keep in mind however that graphically intensive 3d games may be slow to load or drop frames during gameplay the elephone PA end includes support for 802 11 and Wi-Fi GPS and Bluetooth 4.0 I think the Wi-Fi signal could be a bit stronger but I didn't have any issues with GPS for cellular network support there's tri-band GSM dual band WCDMA and non-us LTE bands unfortunately it does not support t-mobile at all actually and only partially supports 18 t 2g due to the missing GSM 1900 band I was able to receive 2g speeds with AT&T but only occasionally while outdoors I couldn't use the phone while indoors at all and often found the phone to be dropping signal even when only a couple of miles away from the cell tower so if you're in the US this is not going to be good at all if you want to use it as an actual phone the PA thousand speaker sounds okay but it's neither loud nor clear it's good enough for basic use but the distortion prevents me from wanting to use the device exclusively to play music war videos the headphone audio quality is good as is the case with almost all modern smartphones but I did notice that it is a tad quiet the lower volume is probably best for my hearing but I would have liked the option to turn it up to a level more comparable with other devices this may just be an issue with a stock rom so hopefully elephone can fix this in the future the four thousand milliamp our internal batteries should be able to get most users through a full day of use although your numbers will depend on your usage I powered up the P 8000 from a full charge at 9:30 a.m. and was able to get it to last until about 10:30 a.m. the next day with just over 5 hours of screen on time that was without cellular connectivity Wi-Fi and brightness set to about 75% a somewhat expected trade-off of having this large of a battery is the amount of time that it takes to charge the device from 0 to 100 even with the 2 amp charger it took me a little under 4 hours to charge the device completely battery life is definitely better than most phones nowadays but I did notice that it drained very quickly once I started using the device hopefully this is just a bug with a stock rom that elephone can fix in the future unfortunately the fingerprint reader is on the back of the device which makes it difficult to use without visually looking for it it's advertised to be a 360 degree sensor but I didn't find it to be very accurate when using it from different angles I tested it a few times and found that if I place my finger perfectly on the sensor it was able to read my fingerprint with about 70 percent accuracy obviously this will vary a bit from person to person but if you are having trouble it can't help to add a single finger twice so that the phone just has more data to compare with overall it's a nice addition although I do wish that it worked more accurately from different angles or was placed on the front of the device now the phone may be talking up the 13 megapixel Sam rear camera but it didn't really produce anything above average for this price category in my testing sure you can get a good image but it does have some issues focusing and setting exposure values HDR helps but it's still kind of an issue low light performance is also very poor and I never felt that I could count on the camera to get a good shot the camera app is just the open-source mediatek app so there's nothing really new here but hopefully elephone can improve the camera in the future the PA thousand runs android 5.1 lollipop out of the box it's completely stock with the exception of the elephone launcher there isn't an app drawer but i do like how you can swipe between different folders of apps to quickly find what you're looking for the third-party app icons can look a bit too modified in my opinion but all of this can be remedied with a third-party launcher there is a theme store but individual theme changes only affect the wallpaper and system icons as far as I can tell there does seem to be a bug that prevents you from changing the lockscreen wallpaper in the current build so hopefully elephone can resolve this in the future before you go commenting telling me that I don't know how to change the lock screen wallpaper I'd like to confirm that I've tried changing it in both the launcher and system settings with both the gallery and photos apps with no results other than those minor changes the elephone p8 thousand runs a completely stack build which many enthusiasts will appreciate that also means that the p8 thousand is missing extra setting options for things like double tap to wake sadly the phone does not support gestures at all which is odd considering that the P 7000 included these you do get mirror vision however which lets you adjust the display colors to your liking the phone is said to be working on CyanogenMod 12.1 and niai roms for the p 8000 but it's currently unclear when those will be released they have released a fly me ROM as well although I haven't tested it myself you can purchase the elephone p8 thousand in either white silver or gold for about $170 there is a single 16 gigabyte partition and you can always expand that with a micro SD card up to 64 gigabytes so that brings us to my conclusion although the P 8000 may look impressive on paper there are just too many deal-breakers for me to recommend this device while it does have excellent battery life a great display and a nice design there's also a few glaring flaws the camera is average at best quality control seems to be lacking when it comes to the display and the speaker output sounds distorted if you're in the US the zenfone 2 is going to be a better option since it offers full 4G LTE support for AT&T mobile and if not the meizu m2 note and Lenovo k3 note are much better devices overall and they actually cost less thank you for watching this video and please make sure to give it a thumbs up below if you enjoyed it also please make sure to subscribe to the channel if you'd like to see more content and feel free to leave a comment below finally be sure to visit the Android Authority website for additional coverage is we are your source for all things Android
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