Gadgetory

days ago at Aoife in Berlin we got a look at a pretty interesting development the Marshall London as a smart phone made by a speaker and audio company we were definitely intrigued and we were excited to get our hands on a review unit well I've kept pretty mum about this and I decided to wait until just after Eva to do this but here it is I actually have my hands on one thanks to Marshall and now the charge of agar from Android Authority what's going on everybody and here is your unboxing and first impressions on the Marshall London and now here we are with the Marshall London as you can see here the phone is already pretty much implying view on the box even on the back right here with the leather backing that Marshall makes a lot of their amps and their speakers out of personally I have a Marshall stand more and absolutely love the thing but yeah we have the Marshall London here and we're doing an unboxing because Marshall has added in a few really nice goodies with this particular phone I've been really waiting to do this and I decided to wait until just after getting home from Aoife in order to bring this to you now starting off right away we have a pic right here in the middle now the pig is one of Marshalls signature icons right here and that's what you it's what you get right off the bat it doesn't seem like I can remove it though which is perfectly fine and there you go now when you open up the cover it's not even just the phone itself it's covered up already and of course on the front there there motto long live rock and roll so I'm gonna put this aside real quick it's gonna be a little bit unconventional compared to other unboxings where you just have the plastic on the front we're actually going to unwrap this phone which is really nice now feasibly you should be able to get spares for this phone might be a little bit tougher to find when compared to you know phones like older Samsung's or anything like that but we do have the battery I'm going to go ahead and just pop that out and you even have long live rock and roll as part of the battery design so that's really awesome pretty funny so here well here was what here's what I was expecting when unboxing this phone you have these Marshall headphones right here now I'm going to confirm what the actual name of these headphones are but I actually have a pair of these already and they work really great from what I can tell this particular version if I look closely yes there are three who's there that you can use for any smartphone and they will control the music and the volume and really I can already test that these headphones are pretty awesome already now here's a really funny part about the charging cable it also has a very unique design it is made of a fabric rather than just a straight-up plastic which is already pretty cool and should help when in terms of it tangling so probably won't tangle as easily then of course it has that ridged pattern design on the two ends so really living up to the marshal design language and so here we are with the moment of truth we're going to go ahead and unwrap I hope that I can say that about this phone the marshal London right here so Marshall right there alright and then logging live rock and roll once again will pop that battery in we can fire this baby up as if you're plugging into an amp that's awesome now of course you're going to be getting somewhat mid-range specifications here definitely nothing flagship worthy but then again they are focusing on the audio experience being what you're going to be using here going through some of the elements here we are dealing with a pretty pretty standard version of Android here of course the Android I want to say lollipop of course let's see exactly which version it is 5.0 0.2 and hopefully there'll be some updates in the future but we already have some of that Marshall style here that clock right there is one that I really wish that I could have for plenty of other phones and then right over here 101 I'm sure it's pretty easy to recreate but it's nicely that's already there off the bat if we go to the top right here you see this this Marshall button right here just go ahead and hit that button and it will bring down the audio player now what's great is Marshall has integrated a number of different streaming players like SoundCloud Spotify and Mixcloud but you can also always have your local music on there as well and what you do is you can just play on here I'll sign in to my Spotify soon enough and bring you how that sounds but really the local file is at flack if you do a lossless quality sound file it's probably where you're going to get the most out of here alright so going through the Marshall London right here I did already put on some of my applications after I turned on this particular device just so you can get some examples of what the Marshall engine is actually like now we do have a lot of elements from stock Android this is a pretty vanilla version of Android with a few extra things built in some nice features and I also found out that the volume roller as we'll call it over here you can actually press it and it's a shortcut to the camera now we have an 8 megapixel camera on the rear a 2 megapixel camera on the front and as I click on that press in on the roller over here and there we are on the camera the display is 720p which might be a little bit of a disappointment but 4.7 inches is the size here at 720p works just fine on smaller displays like this anyway but we'll get into more of that in our full review underneath the surface we do have the Snapdragon 410 which is a little bit more low spec and I have already seen some of the slowdown in trying to install the applications that I wanted to put on here but nothing really too out of the ordinary for something like the Snapdragon 410 and it is backed by a cirrus logic sound card you may know cirrus logic as wolfson but now they have that new name and that is what you have here for audio processing so you'll be able to get high fire audio everything from FLAC files to lossless audio on here and of course if you were to hit the button up here you get the Marshall amp right here that will allow you to change in the equalizer exactly what you want the sound to be like so that's the kind of processing that you need and of course you have the dual setup of the headphones up here so I pointed my microphone this way to the Marshall London to give you an example of what the sound would be like just in this first impressions here and from what I can tell already from my Spotify working through this particular application I do think it's already pretty great the speaker's are up here on the top and here on the bottom underneath the Marshall logo and what I'm going to do here is just give you an example using the hip-hop equalization so you can see that the base is being bumped up the mids or kind of brought down a little bit more and we're trying to do the more extremes here for hip-hop songs so we have this one right here and I'm going to go ahead and hit play actually one thing I did notice is that the Marshall button application doesn't really work with this version of Spotify just yet that's just been my first impression thus far I've been able to get it to pause the music but it's kind of in and out so I wonder if there's a software thing going on right now but we do have this Korean hip-hop song right now that we're going to do right here this goes up to all the hard ropes let's just do some Bruno Mars just for the heck of it because there's a lot of stuff going on there and of course we have let's go back and hit uptown funk I have to say undoubtedly my favorite part about the marshall is its look you just don't get a phone that looks like this with Marshalls amp design over on the side and then of course the features that are underneath the volume rocker is really fun to use as well it just kind of works like a analog to digital input really it just all it does is just make the volume go up or down but really it's a lot of fun to use it and it feels very analog despite this being of course a full digital smartphone and then of course you have the ports on top for headphone jack and whatnot I am going to be testing the audio quality of these using Marshalls own headphones and then maybe a couple of other ones because obviously with bluetooth you kind of get a general standard for all of them so really the the actual action is going to be up here and then of course that Marshall button up top which gives this a pretty unique feel now before you say that this phone is actually one that is just a rebranded let's say Chinese phone but actually is not the case they told me at showstoppers at IVA in Berlin that this phone was completely designed in Sweden and then manufactured for sale in England and across parts of Europe no this phones not coming to the US though I did tell them that if I were to review this phone maybe I could make a case for the fact that this phone should come to the west because a lot of people love marshall products here in the united states and we should really get more of them so with that in mind we're going to go ahead and get into our full review of this i'll be listening to a lot of music podcasts anything this phone was marketed as not only being a phone for just rock and roll listeners but for literally any other genre in any other form of music so that's exactly what i'm going to do with this so keep it tuned to android thority for all of our great content and for the upcoming full review of the marshall london stay tuned here and head on over to the side to see footage from Aoife in berlin which just ended in our recap video was just posted as well so make sure you take a look at that and more content from my brothers and sister in Android head on over to Android or decom and our forums in order to talk about Android and see even more and when you're done with all of that keep it tuned here listen to our podcast and remember that Android Authority comm is your source for all things Android