[Android General] mohammad ahamad:
The good: 2GB RAM perfectly unleashes the potential of MT6592, so in terms of gaming, THL T11 is the one of the fastest 8-core smartphone I’ve ever experienced (the other is Huawei Honor 3X). Good craftsmanship as on previous THL handsets. The protective case is smart with automatic wake-up and can be used as a stand.

The bad: The protective case frequently flip open itself. The camera is disappointing.

Bottom line: Though it is 20 US dollars above the que-limit price for a Chinese phone, THL T11 is still worth the price, because it is very close to a high-end stuff in many aspects.

Price has long been my first concern if it comes to talking about a Chinese cell phone, so I didn’t mean to do much about the USD220 THL T11 when the cheapest phone with the Octa-core MTK6592 CPU has been 70 US dollars cheaper, namely, Mijue M10.

Fortunately the 2GB RAM drew my attention and made me wonder if it would help make a difference. Well, it did, and I saw something that stunned me quite a lot, like what you would see in the video below.

Yep, the cars of NFS Most Wanted flied! That gave me confidence to try Real Racing 3, which, seems not bad on the T11, too. And such a phone – I can call it a beast – of course deserves a full review. So here it is.

[YOUTUBE]hBY8Uhi9iPM[/YOUTUBE]

1.	Design:

THL T11 is generally a copy of Xiaomi M3, or you may say both the 2 Chinese-brand phones stole the design language of Nokia Lumia 920, including a long rectangle face with sharp corners, curved-out left and right edges, as well as flat top and bottom.

As the T11 has a user-replaceable battery, there are inevitably seams on its edges for opening of the back cover. That aside, the handset inherits the good craftsmanship from its THL predecessors.

The rear side of THL T11 delivers a soft feel like that from a velvet blanket -- quite different from stock hard plastics covers; being a little bit narrower but thicker, the smartphone looks more compact than Xiaomi Mi3; and it has a neat appearance with no redundant buttons or holes besides a volume rocker, a power starter, a micro USB port, and a 3.5mm jack.

A bonus point could be the protective case which is composed of an extra back cover and a foldable piece of leather. You can flip the front cover open and close to wake up the display and let it sleep. And like the Smart Case of iPad, the T11 case can be used as a stand for video watching, too.

Perhaps the condition is just for the very T11 I hold in hand -- the front cover open itself due to a tensile force, so I have to let the face of the handset down when I put it on a table.

2.	Display:

This week I tried three Chinese mobile phones with 5-inch 720p screens, namely, Cubot X6, Mijue M10, THL T11. Of them, Cubot X6 and THL T11 have the worst and best displays, respectively.

On the T11, you can see all the details of an image that should be shown with the resolution of 1280 by 720 pixels, and the mild and lively colors are quite eye pleasing.

3.	Camera:

If THL T11 had a good camera, I would be willing to spend 30 US dollars more --- USD250 for a cellphone with no major drawback is quite a deal. Unfortunately, THL would rather save the money for a lower price.

The back camera is just a little bit better than a total disaster with low real resolution and pale colors, while the front camera is somewhat heartening. By the way, remember to peel off the piece of blue protective film on the lens of the rear camera, or you’ll get a more blurry picture.

Normal light:

Low light:

With flash:

Under fluorescent lamp:

Selfie:

4.	OS:

The T11 runs on the pure Android 4.2.2 with Google Play store pre-installed. People on XDA-developers may not be android purists, but I think this hardware would set your mind at ease for development.

5.	Performance

With the gaming experience aforementioned, I knew the T11 would have high scores on benchmark apps. And it did. Antutu gives the smartphone a high score of 27196 and GFX Bench 3.0 says it is able to deal with 41 pictures of 720p resolution in a second.

Not only gaming, every operation on the THL stuff is fast, such as switch across apps trays, open and close of apps, slide of pictures. However, I still feel hiccups during the switch between widget trays – the same problem with all Android 4.2.2 Chinese phones I’ve tested.

It seems that the MTK6592 Octa-core CPU and Mali450 MP4 quad-core GPU make a real fine chipset allocation, which, however, needs a big random access memory (RAM) to liberate itself from fetters. According to my memory, THL T11 should be as fast as Huawei Honor 3X, and the latter, worth more than USD300, happens to contain a 2GB RAM, too.

[YOUTUBE]Z6NGH-k48e8[/YOUTUBE]

6.	Battery:

Just like what I did on Cubot X6 and Mijue M10, I let a 720p music video loop on the T11 till the battery dies, and at the same time, the Battery Monitor Widget watched out the power consumption. Finally, the 2750mAh lasted the smartphone for about 6 hours of playback.

7.	Others:

Though I don’t feel NFC is very useful, at least for now, this module on the T11 is quite responsive -- it connects very quickly to Nexus 4 and transfers files quite smoothly -- have a look at the video above.

8.	Conclusion:

Of all cheap Chinese phones, THL T11 may be the first one that I think is a worthy opponent against some internationally known brands. Except camera, the T11 is fine by all means, and in terms of speed, it should’ve been one of the fastest of all 8-core phones by far.