[Device Reviews and Information] oxiroxt:
My brief review

Here's my review. If you consider it should go into a new thread, then contact a mod or something. I don't, because its very brief and I don't need a lot of attention.

The same phone specs as the PO's

Let's call 'em cons:

It died about one year after purchase, as opposed to one year and a half of my former S.Note

Power button stopped working after 6 months. On inspection, the leads soldering had detached. Trying to solder back was extremely hard and ended up with a burnt power button bus. In the end I had to discard the power button and solder the points together. Thankfully the phone would just power on on inserting the battery, and I was able to wake it up with the volume control. 6 months later I had to remove the battery due to environmental excess heat and when I put it back, the phone wouldn't turn on anymore. After messing with the power leads soldering a bit more and with little patience, I did a complete mess and the phone was dead for good.

Talking about the environmental heat the battery can handle: Either the battery cells are extremely sensitive, or too close to each other, or have very bad cooling, or the thermistor is somewhat messed up or the software alert is just way too damn (unnecessarily?) alarming! I got two of these warnings throughout the device life, and I've never before had this happened with other devices. Yeah I live in a rather hot place in summers but it's not nearly as hot as tropical countries. So what gives?

One of the accelerometer axis was inverted! It takes one minus sign somewhere in the drivers code to fix this. Come on Jiayu, are you serious!? Apps such as Google SkyMaps were useless as such.

Light and proximity sensors have very little resolution. Which means although they can detect a reasonable range, they're not very accurate. The proximity sensor I don't care much about. The light sensor is somewhat important if you want to use an app to adjust screen lighting to ambient light smoothly.

The GPS is a useless nightmare. In fact, for all I know all Mediatek GPS suck. A friend of mine has an ISA a19 and it takes minutes to get a location. On G4S it does it fast, but it's far from precise. It renders navigation apps useless. It keeps bouncing from real location to nearby streets. The nav will re-calculate again, and again, and again, and you'll pull your hair just for the sake of calming down not to throw the damn thing through the window. I have tried so many fixes for it, and nothing worked. Probably sharing the same antenna for wifi is not the best of ideas... or who knows what's really wrong. But I've found that there are actually Meadiatek GPS nav units! Guess who not me(!) will ever buy one?:cyclops:

The flash light diffuser would just come off the first or second time I opened the battery lid. Of course eventually I ended up losing it.

The microphone was so loud it was distorting my voice. I had to be careful not to hold the phone too close to my chin or the person at the other end wouldn't get a clear word. Eventually, as it got dirt (I presume) the matter resolved.

Pros, let's say:

This is by far, the most powerful phone I've ever had, and the most usable too! I've been able to do every and all things that came to mind without having to worry about shortcomings in any way.

I've never wanted to mess with the rom because it was just perfect as it was.

The battery, OMG, finally someone in the market understands that there are heavy users out there who don't want to take their charger everywhere with them. The battery REALLY pays off for the thickness, I mean. You get used to the size and weight just as fast as you'd get used to a big screen phone size.

The screen size is just RIGHT. After all screen is one of the most consuming components in a phone. You want your battery to last, you want a decent screen size where you can read and operate comfortably, and whats-more you want a device you can occasionally operate with one hand. And this is it.

You can tell the octacore, gpu and ram. You switch from app to app in a swiftly manner. Everything is smooth. No waits whatsoever. You can run cpu hungry games. Happiness!

The back camera is excellent in my opinion. The front camera not so good.

Overall, with all its cons, mainly due to bad quality, this is the best phone I've ever had.

I am now at this point where I have to choose a new phone. I have browsed all over PandaWill and to much of my digress I have to say I haven't been able to find any significant new models after one year that will compete with my R.I.P. G4S. Even with all the cons in mind, I'm seriously considering buying a new G4S...

BTW, will I get lucky enough that somebody will recommend a phone with the following MINIMUM specs?:

NOT A MTK CPU

WCDMA 900

1Gb ram

8Gb rom

GPS, WIFI, BT

card expansion up to 32Gb

2500mAh battery

4.7-5.5" screen

Under $300

If it was the same specs as the G4S or better, just not an MTK cpu, wow, that'd be amazing. I wouldn't care much for the price then.

Thanks!