Elephone is not a newcomer to the smartphone game as they have produced a lot of devices over the years. The P8 mini is one of their latest models and it has quite a few features including 4GB of RAM and 64GB of storage. Learn more in the full Elephone P8 mini review.
VIDEO REVIEW
UNBOXING
The phone ships with all the usual stuff, no extras included.
DESIGN and DISPLAY
When it comes to the design, the P8 mini is one of those rare compact phones that have 5” 1080p display, which is actually great. It’s sharp and vibrant for both indoor and outdoor use.
The phone has a metal backplate, which is great but the top and bottom parts, as well as the frame, is made of plastic. On the other hand, the build quality is good, I have no complaints.
One of the key selling points of this phone is the dual-camera setup that consists of one 13MP shooter and another 2MP sensor.
There is no LED notification light but we have a beefy 16MP selfie camera with a front firing LED flash. Unfortunately, the capacitive keys are not backlit.
The loudspeaker quality does not really impress like on most of the budget phones.
The fingerprint scanner may not be the fastest out there but it gets the job done and it unlocks the phone straight from the standby mode.
HARDWARE and PERFORMANCE
The phone sports pretty good specs for the price. The device ships with an octa-core MTK6750T chip (1.5GHz), 4GB of RAM and 64GB of expandable storage.
The gaming performance is pretty good if you play the 3D games like Asphalt 8 on medium graphics. However, you should expect quite a few skipped frames and stutter if you switch the graphics settings to the max.
BENCHMARKS
USER INTERFACE
The Elephone P8 mini ships with a stock Android 7.0 out of the box. There aren’t many features to talk about as the company did not add any of them but what is the most important is that the phone is really fast, fluid and responsive all the time, even after installing quite a few apps.
CAMERAS
The Elephone P8 mini can take some good-looking pictures in good lighting conditions. There is a good amount of detail, the pictures look quite sharp and in general, these are decent results from a $140 phone. However, dynamic range is usually off in most of the shots.
The dual-camera setup allows you to take some good-looking pictures with bokeh effect. Sure, this is not the flagship-grade quality but the results are quite impressive for such a cheap device.
The camera does not impress in low-light but honestly, there are a lot more cheap phones that perform worse than this.
Selfie pictures look pretty good. Sure, there could be less noise but in general, the quality is decent for a budget phone. The front-facing LED flash lets you take selfies at night. Don’t expect great image quality but you may find it useful from time to time.
The 1080p video quality is just mediocre. There could be more detail, less noise and there is no continuous auto-focus.
Selfie video quality is again, kind of mediocre but it is possible to use the camera for video chats or other stuff.
DOWNLOAD FULL RESOLUTION CAMERA SAMPLES
CONNECTIVITY
When it comes to connectivity, the call quality is above average, the Wifi works fine and GPS is usable for navigation although it is not the most accurate out there.
BATTERY LIFE
The 2860mAh battery performs quite well. I was able to get over 5 hours of screen-on time, which is a good result considering the fact that I used the phone quite intensively.
CONCLUSIONS
The Elephone P8 mini is yet another cheap phone from China that aims to deliver a lot of value for the price and it succeeds in quite a few ways.
The phone looks quite nice, it has great specs, the dual camera is pretty good for cheap phone and I love that the P8 mini is fast on the daily basis, thanks to the stock Android 7.0.
Obviously, you should consider some caveats like a lack of notification LED light or backlit capacitive keys, mediocre loudspeaker, average video quality and finally, MTK6750 chip is not designed for hardcore gamers.
At the end of the day, the Elephone P8 mini is surprisingly decent phone for the price of about $140 but as always, make sure to consider a few shortcomings like on any other budget phone.
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