[Android General] MacArthur67:
EDIT September 17 2015: ATTENTION!

Don't buy this phone unless you get it almost for free.

My initial review of the X9, which is no longer valid, comes first in the text below.

See the edits at the end for details.

___________________________________________________________________________

iocean X9

This review is based on my experience with one of the first regular production samples of the iOcean X9. It is not supposed to be a pre-production sample, but in some ways it behaves like that. The Android 4.4.4 it came with isn’t ready developed for the hardware and it probably never will be. I guess that the company is concentrating on developing the Lollipop rom for it instead. I suspect that iOcean were in a hurry to get this phone on the market and pushed it out too early on an unfinished Kitkat, instead of waiting for a well working Lollipop. It’s a pity because this phone has a lot of potential and deserves a better rom!

Firmware version: X9_20150608-192523

Despite the buggy Kitkat rom I have done many tests and made many observations in the phone. I could rewrite my notes to a regular short review in a wordier format, but in order to be able to come back here and add more information later on, I keep the text in a notelike form. Refer to the edits at the end of this post for updates. I attach some screen dumps of some of the tests I have done. More screen dumps and links to camera test photos etc. will probably come in a later edit.

NOTE:

There will be a part 2 of this review as soon as I have a final release LP rom in the phone. It’s not really fair to review it entirely on a buggy KK or LP Beta.

[IMG="iOcean X9"]http://www.1949deal.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/2.jpg[/IMG]

[IMG="iOcean X9"]http://d2giyh01gjb6fi.cloudfront.net/default/0001/04/thumb_3524_default_big.jpeg[/IMG]

Specs:

5.0” LCD, 1920 x 1080 pixels FHD screen

CPU: MTK6752 Octa Core, 1.7GHz; GPU: Mali-T760

Android 4.4.4 OS (will get Android 5.x soon)

3GB RAM + 16GB ROM

Dual SIM card, dual standby, micro SIM slot + nano SIM slot

Front camera 5 MP, back camera 13 MP with flashlight and auto focus

Support FDD+TDD LTE/4G/3G/GPS/Wifi/Bluetooth/Miracast/OTG

Networking:

​

2G: GSM BAND 850/900/1800/1900

​

3G: TD-SCDMA BAND 1900/2100, WCDMA BAND 900/1900/2100

​

4G: FDD-LTE BAND 800/1800/2600, TDD-LTE BAND 1800/2300/2600

Design

This phone is thin. Very thin! 6.6 mm in my measurement (specs say 6.5 mm). It also feels very solid and a bit heavy despite the thinness (or maybe due to?). The weight is 145 g (specs say 140 g) but I think it feels heavier, in a good way. The design is very nice. It looks like a tall and very slim iPhone 4. The build quality and the quality feel is very high for the price, but a little bit lower then in a Huawei P8 for example. The texture of the metal frame and the opening for the speaker on the backside don’t give that premium feeling you could wish for. Also the buttons feels a little bit below premium. But for the price the quality feel is really excellent. The power button is in the middle on the right side, below the volume rocker. I don’t like this position as it’s too easy to accidentally switch on or off the phone just by holding it, but it seems standard in many new phones now.

Screen

The screen is excellent. It’s rather bright and vivid and it has good viewing angles. Generally I think that FHD is a bit overkill on a 5” screen. 1280 x 720 pixels is enough “retina” on a 5” screen and a good HD screen is better than a not so good FHD screen, but this is a really good FHD screen. I honestly didn’t expect that for the price.

Cameras

The main camera has a 13 MP Sony Exmor RS IMX214 sensor, which is a well-known and acclaimed sensor that is used in for example Xiaomi Mi4, OnePlus One and Vivo XShot. The camera is excellent and works very well even in low-light. It starts fast, focuses fast, has high sensitivity, little colour crosstalk and most of all the HDR function is really fast (important if you can’t hold the camera really still, or for moving objects). That’s all very rare in Chinese phones no matter what price range they are in. In fact this is the best camera I have ever seen in any Chinese phone (I haven't tried the ones in OnePlus One and Vivo XShot myself). The only little problem I had with the camera is to lock the focus on a certain object in the view by tapping on the screen and get the focus to stay there until I have time to make the shot. Probably that is software related.

The front camera is a Chinese 5 MP OmniVision OV5648. It’s also quite good and it’s even capable of capturing 720p HD video at 60 fps and 1080p HD video at 30 fps.

Performance

The phone is fast, but not as fast as I thought it would be, maybe due to the buggy rom. I get a score of ~37000 in AnTuTu 5.7.1. In Geekbench 3 I get ~4000 in multi-core score, which is almost twice as much as in the MT6732 devices. But as they say in the AnTuTu test, ”many apps only can use one core”, and the single-core score is 810, which is only ~10% better than in a MT6732. In Basemark OS II I get an overall score of 854, which is ~+50% faster than a FHD MT6592 device on Kitkat. In the graphics benchmark in Epic Citadel I get ~40 fps in average in Ultra High Quality mode.

However, the phone is running a buggy 32-bit Kitkat on a 64-bit SoC and I expect the performance to go up a bit once iOcean has put out a final release Lollipop upgrade for it.

Web browsing is fast and the Sunspider 1.0.2 test finishes in ~910 ms in Chrome and ~780 ms in the stock browser (yes the old stock browser is faster than Chrome). The MT6752 seems to be only ~10-15% faster in the Sunspider test than a MT6732, which corresponds to the +10% better single-core score in Geekbench 3. As a reference, my reference phone, an iPhone 6, only need ~330 ms to finish the sunspider test.

Network

4G LTE is really very fast in this phone and I didn’t know how fast download speeds my 4G network was capable of until I got this phone. The phone must have high sensitivity and a really fast 4G modem. Probably it’s true as they say in the specs that it can handle download speeds up to 150 Mb/s. I get over 100 Mb/s down and 27 Mb/s up. In comparison the up speed is a bit low, but that's probably limited by the network, since I only get a few percent higher up speed in my reference phone (and a lot lower down speed at the same time).

WiFi

The wifi has good sensitivity and it measures almost the same signal level in average in WiFi Analyzer as my reference in that, an 8” Xiaomi MiPad (tabs can have much larger antennas). Even on a very remote wifi the X9 and the tab measures the same signal level.

GPS

The GPS is also excellent. It locks in fast and I have never seen so many satellites in view and in use in GPS Test before. In my tests outside my house it sees 21 satellites and use 20, with a 3D fix accuracy of 1 m.

Battery

The battery run time is actually quite good, despite the relatively low capacity battery (2050 mAh), FHD screen and 8-core CPU. It manages to stand the Geekbench 3 battery test for 5 h and 10 min, with a battery score of 3100. The run time and score will definitely increase after a few charges, but already the runtime and score is ~50% better than an iPhone 6 (sorry for the iPhone references but it makes sense I think).

Sound

The sound quality in phone calls is really good and the volume is more than enough. The built in speaker on the backside is useless for music (as usual in phones), but good for phone calls. Also here the maximum volume is more then enough in an office environment. The sound quality in high quality earphones is very high, provided that you switch off the BesSurround function which is on by default. The sound volume is more than enough in good earphones (high sensitivity).

Root

The phone comes unrooted, but it becomes rooted with just a switch in Settings -> Security -> Superuser. In the Superuser setting you can control which apps you have given superuser privileges to. Basically it works in much the same way as SuperSU. Brilliant! Reason enough to buy the phone just for that as soon as it comes with a LP rom. Also there is no bloatware at all installed.

Launcher

The launcher is the CyanogenMod Trebuchet. I’m not sure how and why it ended up in this phone because the phone is not on CM and unlike in CM the launcher can’t be configured in any way in this phone, except the scroll effect between desktop screens, but not between drawer screens. The launcher works well but it’s a waste of a nice FHD screen to only have 5 rows and 4 columns of icons on the desktop and in the drawer and not be able to change that. Hopefully there will be a better launcher in the Lollipop rom.

Dual SIM?

The phone is a dual SIM and dual standby phone, but that's only partly true since one sim slot is a combined SIM/SD slot. Users have to choose between dual SIM standby or single SIM and extended memory, and with only 16 GB storage I would classify this phone as single SIM.

To be continued…

__________EDIT_1___________

I have received an email from an iocean representatve saying:

I have flashed the rom in the link above and it brought the firmware in my phone from version X9_20150608-192523 to

X9_20150624-143035

.

However, it didn't change things much. This rom feels a little bit more stable, but the phone is still not stable. Often when I stress it with something CPU or GPU intense, the phone reboots. In the previous rom I had to force reboot it by holding the on button pressed for 10 seconds in the same situation, which might be an improvement, I'm not sure.

__________EDIT_2___________

I tried the Lollipop beta 20150618 with no better result than with the two previous KK roms and I start to believe that the phone has some hardware issue. I used the EngineerMode to switch on the MTKLogger and then stressed the phone to freeze two times. Then I tried to analyze the log files and figure out what's causing the stability problems. However, I'm no expert and can't really figure out what's causing the crash. The engineers at iOcean asked for the log files and they have them now. I'm currently waiting for their result.

__________EDIT_3___________

Yesterday, September 16, 4 months after I purchased this phone I got it back from "repair" from the dealer. It took 2 weeks for it to reach the dealer, and then they held it for a while before they sent it "to the factory", whatever that means. Small brands like iOcean have no factories by themselves, it's just a brand name and an office with a few employees. After the so called repair at the so called factory, the dealer got the phone back and according to themselves, their QC people took care of it and tested it before they sent it to me. All together it took 2 months for this warranty service.

However, the phone is exactly as faulty as when I sent it back for repair. It froze completely at first AnTuTu test and had to be force restarted by pressing powerbutton for 10s. The phone has an obvious hardware error but they didn't open the phone to change any components. All they did was to flash a fresh firmware to it and change the CPU governor and I/O handler. Probably in some belief that it would cool down the phone a bit and get rid of some of the overheating problems, as if that would help much when the max clock freq. still is 1.69 GHz. Changing governor, thermal policy and max clock freq. could have saved this phone from breaking when it was new maybe, but now it obviously have some hardware problem and the dealer did nothing about that when they had it.

To make things extremely much more complicated the iOcean company went bankrupt in July. The rumour has it that they will restructure the company and make a come back, but I'm not so sure. And even if they will be back it's very uncertain if they will support previously relased models at all. The X9 never got the LP firmware it was supposed to have before the company went bankrupt. Not a working KK either.

As an edit on top of this long post I add a warning to buy this phone because: 1. The KK fw it comes with is a disaster. 2. The LP Beta is a disaster. 3. iOcean went bankrupt. 4. There will probably never be an official well working KK or LP fw for this phone. 5. Even with good fw it would overheat a lot unless the clock freq. is lowered a lot.

__________EDIT_4___________

I have now sent this phone back for good to where I got it from. If some other misfortunate X9 owner wants to take over this thread please PM me. Otherwise I will close this thread soon. I'm through with with this device.