[Android General] zijin_cheng:
THL 5000 Review

Introduction

I was completely shocked and awed when I heard about the THL 5000. Coming from my Nexus 4, which had subpar battery life, 5000mAh seemed like a dream. 2 day battery life? That's how I want to live my life!

As mentioned above, the defining feature of this handset is its mammoth battery. However, here are the other specs below:

Key Specifications:

5.0 inch screen, 1920 x 1080 pixel display

GSM 850/900/1800/1900MHz WCDMA 850/2100MHz

MTK6592, Cortex-A7 Octa core,2.0GHz

13MP back camera + 5MP front camera

2GB RAM + 16GB ROM

Bluetooth, NFC

Dual SIM Standby

MicroSD Card Slot

Android 4.4.2

How will the 13MP camera stack up? How will the 5000mAh deal with the notoriously power hungry MTK6592 SoC? Let's see what we have.

Unboxing the THL 5000

The THL 5000 comes in a nice white box with the THL logo on the front. It had the usual contents, earphones, a microUSB cable and a charger.

Note: Instead of giving me a North American charger, they gave me a European charger with an adapter instead.

Hardware

The THL5000 has a decidedly small footprint for a phone containing such a large battery. Its dimensions are 144.2 x 70.4 x 8.9mm. Impressively, it is only 2mm longer than the Samsung Galaxy S5 and 0.8mm thicker. Its width is 2mm less than the S5, which is even more impressive.

Its 146g weight is also well distributed within the body, making it feel good in the hand.

The design of the THL 5000 in my opinion is uninspired. It is a featureless rectangular slab with a chrome bezel surrounding it. The material surrounding the screen is bevelled downwards, somehow making the THL 5000 look even worse.

The materials used in the construction of this device is nothing special, but is not especially terrible either. It feels solid in hand and does not feel like it would bend if you really tried (unlike a certain Apple product ahem...).

The front of the device contains the proximity sensor, front facing camera and mic. The removeable back is black textured plastic and holds the speaker, 13MP camera and flash.

The volume buttons and power button are well situated heightwise on both sides of the phone, making them relatively easy to reach. However, these buttons feel flimsy and wiggle easily within the housing, and sometimes they have to be pressed correctly to for it to register. I am probably going to use an app like Gravity Screen to avoid using the power button to ensure it doesn't spoil.

Opening up the back cover, you will see the non-removeable 5000mAh battery, a MicroSD slot, and a GSM only SIM Slot and another GSM/WCDMA SIM slot.

Display

I unfortunately was shipped a THL 5000 from a later batch that had washed out colours, probably due to high levels of gamma. THL representatives have said that there is nothing they could do to fix this either. I was able to lessen it using screen filters from the app store, and while not ideal, worked out just fine. So take the display section with a grain of salt.

The screen is a 5" 1920x1080 resolution panel with Corning Gorilla Glass 3 and OGS (One Glass Solution) technology. With the screen filters, the colours on the device are a little on the cool side and absolutely do not contain the oversaturated colours (which I personally like) of the Galaxy series' AMOLED screens.

Sunlight legibility isn't bad at all, with a maximum brightness of 500nits, its not hard to use in direct sunlight.

Battery

With a 5000mAh battery, there is no doubt that this phone will have amazing battery life. Even current phones with the largest battery packs top out at around 4000mAh (Huawei Ascend Mate 2). THL touts a talk time of 47 hours, WiFi browsing of 11 hours, and 11.6 hours of video playback. Let's see how THL's numbers stack up to real life use. In addition, I will be comparing this phone's battery life compare to others such as the Galaxy S5 and Xperia Z3. GSMArena does 3 key battery tests on its phones, namely calling, web browsing and video. As I do not have the resources to do all three tests, I only performed the web browsing test and the video test (who is going to talk on their phone for 47 hours anyway?).

I set the screen to about 200nits and installed Web Reloader from the Google Play Store and used it to reload webpages over WiFi every few seconds. First, I reloaded the mobile version of the CNN home page every 10 seconds for 3 hours. Then I transitioned to www.focalprice.com and reloaded that every 30 seconds for 3 hours. Finally, I used www.gearbest.com and reloaded this page every 30 seconds for the rest of the time. The phone finally died after 10:50 of browsing. While this is indeed an impressive number, to put this into perspective, the Sony Xperia Z3 with a larger screen manages 12:11 of browsing time with just 60% battery capacity. The Galaxy S5 achieves 9:48 browsing time with 56% battery capacity.

Note: Most websites who review phones can dedicate the phone for an entire day of straight testing without using it, but since this is my only phone, I had to start this battery test at 94%, and I also had to use battery intensive apps for about 20 minutes as well. Just an FYI.

In the video playback test, the screen was set to 200nits and a standard definition video played. GSMArena also set this test up similarly, except they turned on airplane mode, I chose not to do this in order to better replicate real life, as videos are not usually watched while in airplane mode (unless in an actual airplane). The phone played back video for 12 hours and 2 minutes before dying.

As you can see, THL's claims for WiFI browsing and video playback are not far off from the mark at all. It is refreshing to see a company post real numbers of their products instead of inflating them to sell more devices.

On a more "normal" battery test, the phone was off the charger for 16 hours. During that time, I racked up 5 hours 26 minutes of screen on time, which were a mix of Clash of Clans (and 3 other clones that I also play) for about 45 minutes, an hour of web browsing, 20 minutes of miscellaneous stuff and the rest of the time on 9gag/Feedly. At the end of the day, I was left with 46% battery.

Charging the phone from 0% to 100% took about 4 and a 1/2 hours.

Very few people are going to be web browsing for 10 hours straight per day, so there is no need to keep an eye on battery life. However, it seems that the MTK6592 chipset used in this device is very power hungry and THL also has not optimized the software as well as the big name manufacturers. Hopefully an OTA update will improve battery life even further.

Software and Performance

The THL 5000 runs a stock version of Andorid 4.4.2 with a custom launcher installed and custom icons. I was most disappointed by the smoothness of the stock firmware that came with the phone. I would compare the smoothness of this device to that of the Galaxy S3 and while many wouldn't see the difference, I just moved from a Nexus device and the difference is night and day. This is due to the firmware not being optimized, and hopefully future updates will fix this. This lagginess also cannot be attributed to the MTK6592 processor, as I have played around quite a bit with an Alcatel OneTouch Idol X+, which has the exact same specifications, except a battery half the size. Daily usage of the Alcatel is very very smooth, almost on par with Nexus devices.

The first thing I did when I set up my THL 5000 was install the Google Now Launcher, which is Google's launcher which integrates Google Now into the mix. As a result, performance when swiping between home screens, opening the app drawer, and launching apps were quite laggy. However, I switched back to the stock launcher, and I have to say that I am very impressed with the fluidity and speed of the device. Swiping between home screens, opening of the app drawer and launching of apps is quick and zippy. One would not be able to tell the difference in smoothness of the THL 5000 and a Nexus device and would even say that the THL is more responsive due to shorter transitions/animations.

It does come with some bloatware, which surprisingly did not require root to get rid of, which was a nice touch.

I ran Antutu as well, and obtained a score of 31,881. This is about average for an MTK6592 device with 2GB of RAM and an FHD screen.

Connectivity

I have to admit I was apprehensive about reception of this phone since it was my first chinese phone. However, I was pleasantly surprised, as this phone actually gets better reception than my Nexus 4 here in Canada. In my basement, the Nexus 4 only gets about 2 bars of signal on 3G, while the THL 5000 gets 3-4 bars consistently. It does not have LTE, but I do get HSPA+, with speeds around 36mbps.

Calls are clear and don't drop, however, there is a strange, almost non issue with incoming calls. The phone will ring when there is an incoming call, and whether the screen is on or off, it will take almost 3/4 of a second before the screen allowing you to accept/reject the call pops up. Certainly not an issue, but it does take longer than expected.

WiFi performance is also good, as I get reception anywhere in the house. My Wireless N router is in the basement, and I get reception anywhere in the house, even on the second floor and outside. However, every few hours, WiFi will suddenly stop working. I will still be connected to the network, but I won't be able to load webpages. Stopping and restarting WiFi fixes the problem.

I was concerned with GPS performance as I had heard many reports of GPS issues such as GPS jumping, very long lock times and other issues that happened pre firmware v1.0.9. However, my phone came with v1.1.0 and I did not experience any issue at all. When data was turned on and location was set on high accuracy, I got a lock within 5 seconds. With location set on battery saving mode, I got a lock within 15-20 seconds. It also was very accurate as well, doing me a huge service when guiding me to my next interview's building.

Bluetooth and NFC are also included in this phone, and both work as expected.

Side Note: This will not work on Wind Mobile in Canada

Camera

The THL 5000 features a 13MP camera with a Sony Sensor and F2.0 aperture. It focuses quite well and takes nice photos. Below are some pictures.

As you can see, the quality of these pictures in daylight is quite good. Colour reproduction is quite accurate, and detail is not bad either. Overall, I would rate daylight pictures taken by this camera to be a little better than a Galaxy S3. The bottom two shots have HDR enabled.

Low light performance is another story. Pictures are very grainy under low light. Even my old Nexus 4 has better low light performance than this. I took a few shots in low light, and below are the shots with and without flash.

The flash on this phone, while not powerful, has the ability to wash out the subject of the picture.

In conclusion, if you're taking pictures in the daytime, expect good smartphone pictures to come out of that. If you're in a dark setting, forget it.

EDIT: Please note that after reading review, the reviewer could get quite high quality shots in low light and this is probably due to my lack of camera finesse and expertise, so please take the low light section of this review with a grain of salt.

Video quality is average as well, with the quality being a little lower than picture quality, which is to be expected.

The stock camera software has terrible performance. When you move the camera, the screen will lag behind by almost 1 second. Installing Google Camera from the app store solves this problem, but video recording at 1080p and 720p isn't supported.

The front 5MPx camera is quite good for use in Skype, Hangouts and selfies.

Verdict

Is this phone at $269.99 USD worth it? On one hand, its relatively cheap, and its 5000mAh battery should sufficiently convince any heavy smartphone user. On the other hand, one too many flaws could annoy users sufficiently to return this product.

Pros

Cheap

Massive battery. It refuses to die on you no matter how much you use it

Good specs

Good camera performance in daylight

Impressive reception on calling, texting, data

Cons

Battery life only about par with other flagships with 1/2 the battery capacity

Terrible low light camera performance

Its hard to find fault with the THL 5000 when it costs $269.99. A massive battery, fast octacore processor, FHD screen and great reception make this phone a great buy. The software experience on this phone is also fluid, responsive, and a pleasure to use. THL has also promised to continue providing OTA updates to the phone, and hopefully THL will continue quashing bugs, improving performance and decrease battery consumption.

I definitely recommend this phone to anybody looking for a cheaper device with great specs, great battery life and a fluid user experience.