With just a short while left until the long awaited Elephone P9000 goes on sale, I figured its worth pitting the old against the new in a show down.

Elephone’s previous phone the P8000 surprised many people with its large 4000mAh battery and bright screen, whilst leaving some disappointed with slow software updates and several bugs.

In the  Elephone P8000 vs P9000  head to head we will see if the company has learned from past mistakes and is able to present a better more rounded phone.

Elephone P8000 vs P9000 Design

The Elephone P8000 design was more of an evolution of the P7000 than a design revolution, the rear cover featured a nice faux carbon fibre texture and the phones metal frame gave a fairly sophisticated look whilst also ensuring the phone would not bend under normal usage.

Something that many people found disappointing when the phone was released, was the larger than necessary black borders that surrounded the screen, these had been disguised very well in the original renders and came as a real disappointment.

Apart from the 5.5″ screen with its black borders the front was also home to 3 capacitive buttons, the home button also works as a halo style LED notification light. 

The P8000 was not a small phone by any means weighing in at a substantial 205 grams and also fairly chunky at thick at 10 mm, most of the extra weight and width was due to the inclusion of a 4000mAh battery.

For the P9000 Elephone have managed to slim the phone down to a much more acceptable 8mm and managed a 55 gram weight reduction bringing the P9000 in at just 150 grams.

The Elephone P9000’s design really stands out over the P8000’s due to the striking appearance of the virtually absent screen bezels, the 2.5D display curvature of the screen works to further increase the look making it appear that no bezels are present, the P9000 also features a stylish flat rear design.

On the P8000 he fingerprint sensor that was integrated in to the home key, for the P9000 this has now been given its own designated side button. 

From a design standpoint it would appear that Elephone have certainly seemed to listen to the criticisms levelled at the P8000 by its users.

Elephone P8000 vs P9000 Performance

The elephone P8000 featured an8-core MediaTek MT6753 processor running at 1.3 GHz with a Mali T720 GPU and 3GB of RAM. 

For everyday tasks this proved to be adequate enough to perform well and gave a smooth user experience, for less GPU intensive games performance was ok, but more intensive games suffered some frame rate drops and lag.

It looks like Elephone wants to really push the P9000’s hardware capabilities, they have chosen to include a Helio P10 processor and 4GB of RAM . 

When the phone is released it will be amongst the most powerful phones on the market and be expected to easily handle anything you can currently throw at it.

Elephone P8000 vs P9000 Display

The 5.5 inch IPS LCD full HD resolution found on the P8000 was quite good, providing good colour reproduction, good viewing angles and was brightness levels that meant it was able to be used outdoors.

Elephone have decided to follow the same path as the P8000 for the P9000 and are  again using a 5.5 inch IPS LCD with 1920 x 1080 pixel resolution, hopefully colour reproduction, viewing angles and brightness, will to be at least as good as those found on the P8000 if not better.

Elephone P8000 vs P9000 Battery

A definate highlight of the Elephone P8000 was its 4000mAh capacity battery, easily able to hold over a days worth of charge, some people even managed to eek out  two days of light to moderate usage.

A downside to the 4000mAh battery found in the P8000 was the 4 hours taken to recharge it from flat, it was a real shame that Elephone did not put fast charging on the phone.

Elephone have taken the decision to reduce the P9000’s battery capacity down to just 3100mAh, this will help to thin the phone a bit and also keep the weight down, however some P8000 users that upgrade may be a little little disappointed having to recharge more often.

Hopefully Elephones decision to  opt for the Helio P10 will have a positive affect on battery life,  power usage on the Helio P10 is still pretty much an unknown quantity but hopefully its ability to switching the number of cores in use up or down to suit the tasks thrown at the P9000 may help to reduce overall battery use and go some way towards mitigating the reduction in battery capacity, hopefully the P9000 should still see at least a day of usage between charging, although most users charge their phones nightly so this hopefully won’t be a major problem.

Elephone P8000 vs P9000 Camera

The P8000’s 13mp sensor was often a bain of contention for its users, whilst it was capable of producing some great images, focus tended to be a bit hit and miss as did low light photography and white balance, this did improve with firmware updates but was sadly an issue that got a fair amount of attention.

Elephone will hopefully have imaging sorted this time around on the  P9000, the choice to fit a  20MP rear camera with dedicated autofocus should help to provide stunning images, with incredible definition and sharpness, the thing that Elephone need to do is dedicate the necessary time to ensure that the software is able to process and render the images properly, the phone will have an 8mp camera up front, which should allow some half decent selfies.

And the winner of the Elephone P8000 vs P9000… 

Is the P9000 by a fairly long shot

From the information currently available about the P9000, it appears that Elephone have made some pretty significant improvements over the P8000, the Mediatek MK6797 and the screen with virtually no bezels and 20.mp camera will go along way to wards silencing some of Elephones critics and the slimmer lighter body will also ensure that the phone feel better in the hand, even if it comes at the expense of battery life.