[Elephone Vowney] MOPKOBKA:
A small review of a user

Elephone Vowney review

Introduction

Elephone are a young Chinese company trying to climb in the market of smart phones. The market is quite crowd now considering such old players as Samsung, LG, HTC, Huawei, Xiaomi, Lenovo, Apple, and many others. Even Amazon failed to penetrate the market by offering a very innovative phone. How small young company can even think of any success? Certainly a major success point will be keeping price much below competitors’, therefore Elephone flagship model has an impressive specification with a price 2 times less. 2K screen, 2.2 Mhz 4 core, 4Gb RAM, 21Mp camera, 32Gb internal storage extendable to 128Gb, massive 4000 mAh battery, metal frame, US LTE networks coverage, dual SIM, NFC (see Elephone site for detailed specification). I always considered that a diversity is a good thing, therefore supporting a young company and saving $300 made me to purchase the phone. I did pre-ordering phone and was waiting almost 6 months to get it. It looks like the company was too optimistic to produce it sooner.

Unpacking

A phone arrived in a pretty standard packaging like a bunk bed. A package isn’t sealed. It gives an opportunity to a reseller to upgrade a charger to compatible with your country or setup a proper language.

[IMG="Packaging"]http://s31.postimg.org/ug67enzln/DSC_0795.jpg?is_embedded=true[/IMG]

A box designed to keep additional accessories, as a headset, a dock and others, however currently only AC adapter, USB cable and extra screen protector are shipped with a phone.

[IMG="What is in the box"]http://s31.postimg.org/lnw4tlgjf/DSC_0796.jpg?is_embedded=true[/IMG]

There is no a detailed guide provided, just a very tiny instruction to common programs. A phones is coming with 60% charge that allow you to start using it instantly without waiting few hours.

First turn on

This phone has a minimal set of hard controls. I use to own Samsung phones having a separate power on button. Vowney’s hard controls include only a volume and a screen on buttons. The screen on button is multifunctional and can be used for turning a phone on. I like this minimalistic buttons set. Even Apple provide one more a hard button. I didn’t measure booting time, however I can confidently say it is under a minute. A standard Android 5.1 screen was shown after booting. I can admit that the phone has a vanilla Android software without any Elephone customization and bloatware. I like it. Vowney doesn’t have a replaceable battery, and it meant I needed to figure out how to insert SIM card. A solution came surprisingly, when I shook the box, I could hear movement of some part inside and finally it came out. It was a small pin similar to one used by iPhone to push out a SIM card slot door. Vowney has two doors, one is used for SIM, and another one can be used for MicroSD card or for second SIM. I can admit it was my first introduction not only to Vowney, but to Android 5.1 too. After inserting SIM I tried using phone and quality was acceptable, however I didn’t like new Android 5.1 phone application look. Next I logged in Google play and installed my favorite apps as IsGenuine, Atjeews and Kamerton. IsGenuine showed me all hardware specifications as expected. I check a music quality and it was good, surprisingly phone played a music over Samba connection good as well.

Build quality and ergonomics

These parameters are really important especially for a phone with a premium price. Vowney built from metal and carbon plastic. A frame made from a metal and gives a phone certain rigidity, when a back is covered by a plastic. Although I originally ordered a gold phone, I received a gray one. It was done with my consent. Generally I like a gray more, it looks manlier. A plastic back cover is a scratch resistance and looks better than a metal which eventually will be covered by tons of scratches. Since most phone sleeves are a plastic, and using them to protect a metal from scratches generally converts a phone to a plastic version anyway. Why do not get it a plastic from beginning and avoid using any protection sleeve? I think Elephone solved it right. Considering screen size, Vowney can be categorized as a phablet. However it doesn't look a very huge, you can see it has exact size of a pocket calculator.

[IMG="A form factor"]http://s31.postimg.org/6s342hse3/DSC_0798.jpg?is_embedded=true[/IMG]

It fits comfortable in most jeans or trousers pockets. It isn’t really heavy and hardly noticeable in a pocket. It fits well in man’s hand as well, however can be a bit big for a women. All hard controls are placed on a right side of a phone and can be comfortably operated by thumb. A finger print scanner can be easy reachable by a pointing finger. A camera lens is placed on the top of a phone reducing a risk of covering it by fingers when operated. A bezel is quite thin, however there are reasonably large screenless areas on top and bottom. Since top includes a speaker and a front camera, I can accept it. However bottom part looks like a waste. A bottom part contains actually a light notification part. It is questionable since most people expect to see the notification on top. It has also a form of a soft button, however it isn’t. It actually fools an operator. The light is a single color – white. Most phones have multi color light making it more informative for different cases. In overall I think the phone is well built and easy operate, only one disappointment is the notification light.

Screen

A screen is a really important part of a phone. Brightens and sharpness, easy to read under any angle are major parameters. Screen resolution is 1440x2368 (2392). You can see slightly lower long side resolution. It is because soft control buttons are part of a screen. I consider it as a disadvantage, since buttons occupy some space of a screen otherwise could be available for applications. HTC or Samsung for example keep soft control buttons separated from a screen. Vowney screen sharp and bright in indoors light conditions, however hardly visible outdoors especially in bright sun. My previous Samsung S3 performed slightly better in sun. If you do not use a phone much outdoors, then more likely you will love Vowney screen for a sharpness.

Camera

Although I do not consider a smart phone camera seriously, I still will give my impressions. Many people use a phone camera as a main camera. So far a resolution is very impressive. It is 21Mpx. However the camera application seems isn’t good. An image is coming blurry and distorted colors. There is no possibility to get a raw image or at least control JPEG compression level. I keep a big hope that Elephone will eventually upgrade the camera application, however for now the high megapixel sensor doesn’t give much advantages.

Sound

Sound quality is satisfactory. Phone call, external speakers and over headphones. Most of smart phone vendors support currently 24 bits sound, and higher sampling rates. However considering that Android API doesn’t provide support anything higher 16 bits, other vendor do not have any advantages. You need only to use a smartphone vendor application to get higher sample bits, and such application plays only a limited number of high end formats. Vendors do not document proprietary API, and music player vendors can’t support it. Vowney seems designed to support also external DAC, however it is currently only on level of recognizing DAC connection, but it still can’t redirect music there. I assume it will be addressed in software updates.

Performance

I do not play games requiring an extensive graphics usage, however I listen to DSD formatted music requiring a very high processor power. The phone confidently can play 5.6MHz DSD format (DSD128). It still can’t decompress DST64 in real time. Even Intel 1GHz Celeron can do it, therefore I can conclude that Vowney is still behind of even slowest desktop 64 processors. My previous Samsung Galaxy S3, could also play 5.6MHz DSDs, but it was on edge to its performance, and I couldn’t use any other phone functions during the playback. Vowney keeps be responsive as playing the format.

Battery

It is hard to provide any reliable review here since my phone usage pattern is very different from most people. I use phone mostly for listening music in a car over BT connection. Most of my music is in DSD128 format and it means it requires a full processor power. Duration of daily listening is about 2 hours. I also do calls, but not exceeding 10 minutes a day. The phone confidently keeps charge for 5 days at such usage. It keeps it also on day 6, however it switches a processor to a lower frequency (I use power save mode) and DSD 128 becomes grabbled. However DSD64 and other low grade music formats are still playing undistorted.

Software

Unfortunately it is the weakest point of the phone. It looks like ELephone do not have enough resources to manage the phone software properly. It is still behind of competitors who already utilized Android 6.0 (Marshmallow). Even Android 5.1 seems not very stable. ELephone will more likely discontinue the phone because it is very pricy for them, and they will switch to mainstream phones with low price.

Conclusion

Although the phone isn’t a perfect and major lack is software, it is still a nice smart phone. I am really pleasant with it. I hope Elephone will provide Marshmallow upgrade (instead of discontinuing the phone) and also improve a camera application. It would be terrific if they fixed external DAC support and also opened a proprietary API to play higher resolution music. I am pretty sure the phone has the hardware capability however it is disabled. If you look for inexpensive phone with impressive hardware specification and do not mind to be a little behind of latest software, then I highly recommend to save $300 and get the phone. You won’t have much regrets.