It seems that there has been a wave of super-sized smartphones from China and Cubot Max is one of them. It sports a 6” display, it has decent specs but it costs just $114. Learn more in our a full review.

Thanks t0 Efox-shop for sending Cubot Max for a review.

Cubot Max Review: VIDEO REVIEW

[embedyt] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uGaM-gMQ4RE[/embedyt]

Cubot Max Review: UNBOXING

The phone ships with all the usual stuff and some extras include a high-quality soft TPU case.

Cubot Max Review: DESIGN and DISPLAY

The very first thing you are going to notice about this phone is that it is really huge due to its 6” display. It has only 720p resolution but it is surprisingly sharp and nice panel.

We don’t have backlit capacitive buttons but there is a notification LED light, which is a nice addition for a cheap phone like this.

The phone is made of plastic and we have a textured vinyl-like finish on the back. I can’t say that the phone looks or feels premium but it is well made.

The buttons feel nice and tactile.

The loudspeaker sits on the bottom and it is okay but as usual to the cheap phones, the sound is flat.

As for camera, we have a 13MP shooter with a single LED flash.

The backplate can be easily removed to access a 4100mAh battery, two SIM card slots and the microSD card slot.

Cubot Max Review: HARDWARE and PERFORMANCE

The Cubot Max sports some pretty good specs for the price. The phone ships with an octa-core MTK6753A chip, 3GB of RAM and 32GB of storage.

The gaming performance is okay. You should be able to run most of the 2D games and 3D games on the medium graphics but you have to expect quite a bit of stutter on the highest graphics.

Cubot Max Review: BENCHMARKS

Cubot Max Review: USER INTERFACE

The Android 6.0-based user interface will give you a pretty much stock Android experience but there are some added features like a bunch of gesture and motion controls that work pretty well.

I didn’t have any major lags or hiccups even after installing quite a few apps and I believe this is the most important thing for a cheap phone.

Cubot Max Review: IMAGE QUALITY

As for image quality, the camera can take some okay-looking photos in daylight. However, most of the shots look overexposed, the dynamic range and white balance adjustment are poor and so on. Well, this is what you usually get from a cheap phone and the results get a lot worse in low-light situations.

As for selfie shooter, it will do the trick for social media but the quality of pictures is just mediocre.

The 1080p video is mediocre-looking too. See a video review for a video sample.

Cubot Max Review: CONNECTIVITY

I didn’t have any connectivity issues and even the GPS lock speeds and accuracy were okay.

Cubot Max Review: BATTERY LIFE

The 4100mAh battery performs pretty well on the daily basis. I got a full day or even 2 days of moderate usage out of this phone, which is a good result considering a large display.

Cubot Max Review: CONCLUSIONS

Cubot Max is yet another cheap Chinese phone that offers a large 6” screen and some decent specs for the price.

After using it for quite a bit of time, we have to say that a large screen is pretty fun for multimedia consumption. Also, the phone did not lag and it was fast on the daily basis.

As usual to the cheap phones, you should not expect any stellar results from the camera. Also, the phone does not sport any premium materials like metal or glass and it lacks backlit capacitive buttons but it gets most of the basics right. If you add a great battery life, the Cubot Max is a decent offering for the price of just $114.

Buy Cubot Max

The post Cubot Max Review – A Solid $114 Phablet appeared first on Gizmochina.

iNew has a phone that costs $110, it has a 6” HD display and decent specs. Stay tuned to find out if this phone is any good in our full review.

iNew U9 Plus Review: VIDEO

iNew U9 Plus Review: UNBOXING

The phone comes with all the usual stuff and some extras include a pair of earphones, a screen protector and a hard plastic case.

iNew U9 Plus Review: SPECS

iNew U9 Plus Review: DESIGN and DISPLAY

When it comes to the design, the U9 Plus is obviously a huge phone due to it’s 6” display.

Speaking of the display,  it has only 720p resolution but it is still quite sharp for a phone that costs just above $100.

As far as the overall build quality, the phone is well-made but I have to admit that the phone feels a bit plasticky and cheap since it uses only plastic in its construction.

We have a 5MP selfie shooter. Unfortunately, there is no LED notification light and the capacitive buttons are not backlit.

There is a 13MP camera coupled with a single LED flash. On the bottom, we have a loudspeaker, which is not very good but it is not bad for the price of the phone.

The backplate can be easily removed and underneath it you can find a replaceable 3000mAh battery, 2 SIM card slots and the microSD card slot.

The buttons sit on the right side and they are tactile. However, they are made of plastic and feel a bit cheap.

iNew U9 Plus Review: HARDWARE and PERFORMANCE

The phone has a quad-core MTK6735 with the max. clock speeds of 1.3GHz, 2GB of RAM and 16GB of expandable storage.

The gaming performance is pretty good. I played Asphalt 8 on medium graphics and there were no lags. Also, the phone does not overheat.

iNew U9 Plus Review: BENCHMARKS

iNew U9 Plus Review: USER INTERFACE

The phone ships with the already outdated Android 5.1 and iNew’s skin on top of it. There is no app tray but there are quite a few fancy widgets and customization options.

Also, there are some gesture and motion controls but the phone is kind of slow to react to some of the gestures.

The user interface could have been nice but there are some pre-installed apps and even some apps that are designed for Chinese market.

Most importantly, the animations and transitions once you simply scroll through the different menus are slow. Thus, the whole user experience is not as good as I expected. This is something iNew should take a look at to fix this issue with the future software updates.

iNew U9 Plus Review: IMAGE QUALITY

The 13MP camera does not impress. Even the daylight images lack detail and sharpness. Also, the dynamic range adjustment is poor in most of the shots. Finally, the color reproduction is not always consistent.

The low-light shots do not impress either as there is a low amount of detail and quite a bit of noise.

The video quality is okay for the phone this cheap but don’t expect any great results.

A 5MP front-facing camera is not good either as most of the shots have a soft focus.

iNew U9 Plus Review: CONNECTIVITY

I didn’t have any connectivity issues. Even the GPS was very fast to find the position and pretty accurate to use.

iNew U9 Plus Review: BATTERY LIFE

The 3000mAh battery does not look impressive on paper but it performs pretty well considering its low capacity and a large display.

I could get around 5 hours of screen-on time on time but your results may vary, depending on the usage.

iNew U9 Plus Review: CONCLUSIONS

The iNew U9 Plus is a phone that aims to bring a huge 6” display and decent specs for a low price.

It succeeds in a couple of ways. It has a pretty sharp display that is great for multimedia consumption or gaming. Speaking of the 3D games, the phone handles them pretty well if don’t set the graphics on the maximum settings.

Also, the phone has a pretty good battery life considering its low capacity.

On the other hand, the phone has a decent build quality but it looks kind of cheap due to the fact that it uses plastic in its construction.

Also, I was disappointed that the transitions and animations in the user interface are slow, both cameras do not impress, there is no LED notification light and the capacitive buttons are not backlit.

In conclusion, the iNew U9 Plus could have been a nice phone but it has some shortcomings that you have to consider before buying it. Some of the cons hopefully will be fixed with the future software updates but at the moment, you would have to live with them.

The post iNew U9 Plus Review – A $100 Phablet appeared first on Gizmochina.

The post Elephone P9000’s Hidden Features tips and tricks appeared first on Gizmochina.

[embedyt] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8LKdLN4Y6g[/embedyt]

Elephone have sent over a cool Elephone M2 teardown video for the soon to be released all metal M2 business phone.As you can see there is a lot going on in that slim phone chassis.

Lets hope they get the phone out and ready for review soon.

Please leave comments and questions below

Regards Shanos

Pre order the Elephone M2 here

The post Elephone M2 teardown and assembly video appeared first on Gizmochina.

Elephone are a company that have been critiscised recently due to both hardware and software issues in some of their handsets, the software side has seen various bug fixes integrated in to OTA rom updates and for the most part all software issues have been or are being fixed, however with the release of the Elephone P8000 a hardware compromise was made on 5000 of the first units to leave the factory.

The issue was due to the built in breathing notification light not being included, whilst this angered many who had purchased from the first batch of handsets, they may well get to now have the last laugh.

Elephone have released the statement below, confirming that those who purchased an Elephone P8000 that did not have the breathing notification light, will now receive a discount on the upcoming Elephone Vowney.

The Vowney is scheduled to be released around the end of October, this means that the affected P8000 users have around a month to wait, hopefully the discount offered by Elephone will be significant enough that P8000 owners can sell their phones and without too spending too much more be able to upgrade (hopefully having already spent 2/3 months enjoying their current handsets).

Official statement from Elephone regarding discounts for Elephone p8000 users affected by lack of breathing light notification

Elephone P8000, while being a competitive mid range smartphone, became a highly recognized and popular model. This budget-friendly phone offers excellent performance and outstanding 4000mAh battery capacity. We’ve received so many orders that we barely kept up with the schedule. In order to deliver the smartphones to the customers on time, we had to make a compromise. There are 5000 pieces of Elephone P8000s don’t have breathing light, and we’re sorry about the inconvenience brought to you. If your P8000 doesn’t have breathing light, you will get discounts for Elephone Vowney, which packs QHD display, 21MP camera, the most powerful MTK CPU MT6795 and 3GB RAM.

Originally posted on gadgetz.tv

The Vowney is currently available to pre order here, or you can pick up one of the fully working P8000 handsets here

The post Customers Who Got Elephone P8000 Without Breathing Light Notification Will Get Discount For Vowney appeared first on Gizmochina.

Elephone have been working on a multitude of handsets recently, they have a new flagship the Vowney coming soon in 3 different flavours to match users budgets, but they also have also been working hard on their new Metal Design phones series.

The first of the Metal Design series phones the Elephone M2 is set to be released soon and Elephone have provided full specifications as well as images of the finalised handsets.

First up the specs for the Elephone M2, a MediaTek MT6753 octa-core processor is powering the phone along with 3GB of RAM and 32GB of ROM, the inclusion of 32GB rom will come in handy as the phone does not appear to offer micro SD expansion.

The screen is said to be an LG 5.5″ 1920 x 1080p (400ppi) display, if true then this should provide brighter more vivid colours as well as improved daylight viewing when compared to previous Elephone handsets such as the P7000 something to note in the pictures id the use of 2.5D front glass, looking very closely black boarders can still be seen but they are much thinner than on previous phones and are to a degree optically lost when looking through the curvature of the glass screen sides.

Whilst not a true bezelless design it certainly looks a lot better than previous models, that lets not forget came under a fair amount of criticism for their black boarders.

The front of the phone houses the capacitive navigation keys, as well as the home button mounted finger print scanner which has unlock times of a claimed 0.5 seconds.

As mentioned before Elephone have worked hard on the styling of the phone by slimming the bezels and adding the 2.5D glass, where they have also changed from their previous designs is the slim unibody metal design which accounts for 85% of the body and leaves the phone just 7.35mm thick, the use of the unibody on the Elephone M2 should avoid any bendgate issues.

The rear of the Elephone M2 is completely metal, except for the black bar at the top that houses the 13mp camera and flash.

Elephone have chosen to stick with the 13mp Sony IMX214 rear camera (as previously used in the P7000) and will use an 8mp front facing unit (make as yet unknown) hopefully Elephone will have had time to tweak the cameras software to maximise the capture quality.

An area that has seen Elephone criticised recently is their phones operating systems, if you head over to the forums you can keep up to date with rom releases and bug fixes, hopefully this time around more time has been spent getting everything working as it should straight out of the box, its not that Elephone don’t get things fixed, its just that a lot of people feel that phones should not be released without finding and stamping out all but the most minor of problems.

So what do you think of the new Elephone M2? from a design standpoint its not a bad looking device, at just 7.35mm thick it should be easy to hold and fit in your pocket and the addition of 32GB Rom should be more than enough for most users.

Please leave comments below

Regards Shane

Originally posted on gadgetz.tv

If your currently considering an Elephone handset but can’t wait for the release of the M2, be sure to check out the great prices for the rest of the Elephone range

Or if you can wait, get your pre order in for the Elephone M2 here

The post Elephone M2 full specs and images appeared first on Gizmochina.