[Android General] izipizzy:
Design

Let’s start off with the design and how the phone looks. The Elephone M1 is a very stylish smartphone I have to say, it has an elegant look and looks quite premium. Its body includes up of a metal construct which not only supplies durability to the smartphone, nevertheless it appears first-rate aesthetically too. When I gripped the smartphone for the very first time, I knew that I have been dealing with a premium best handset in view that of the fabric that was used to make it used to be made of very excessive first-class., also the fingerprint scanner in the back of the device gives a more eye-catching look to the M. Elephone M1 heirs the design of the Huawei P8 and the iPhone 6, both smartphones are beautiful so is the M1.

Button Placement

In 2015 people tend to buy smartphones with big displays and that’s the issue, some hands are small and some big. The M1 with the 5.5inch display is quite big and in many phones with that big display placing the buttons in the right position is a nightmare. Thankfully the M1 buttons are well aligned and correctly placed, coming from a Note 4 with a 5.7inch display I enjoyed more having the power and volume buttons in the right hand side. Not incorporating a bodily residence button proper within the core is a process that a number of Chinese smartphone OEMs follow and it's not necessarily a good approach. This is because it's not going to provide that clicking sensation when a user really presses a physical home button, and majority of the instances, they will need to tap on the capacitive button.

Display and resolution

I would love to see a Full HD Display on this smartphone but sadly, Elephone integrated it to the Elephone M2 which is an upgraded version of the M1, but don’t panic having an HD display will you more battery life. Despite the HD display on the M1, performs very good. Having the brightness to maximum level I had no problem using the phone under the Sun, also the display is gorgeous, I have never seen such a beautiful HD display on a smartphone at first I couldn’t believe that it was only HD. The M1 has some awesome viewing angles thanks to the IPS panel, even though you will easily be able to notice the difference in display quality thanks to its 5.5 inch screen. The pixel per inch density of Elephone M1 is relatively low, which will degrade the overall quality and experience of the user, but eventually you will get used to it. MediaTek has developed features that are simple to use and cater to the latest trends. MiraVisionTM provides the high-definition, fluid video playback you would expect from an HD television screen while using a mobile device.

Performance

As Isaid earlier the performance of the phone so far is absolutely amazing. With a quad core CPU clocked at 1.3GHz having multiple applications open and gaming was piece of cake for the M1. I tried to squeeze and push the device to its limits I haven’t seen it lag yet, I have to say that Elephone did a great Job with this device. Comparing it to my Note 4 clocked at 2.7Ghz some apps run faster and much smoother on M1, maybe the reason for that is that the MediaTek CPU has a 64-bit architecture, but hey it’s still a 1.3Ghz CPU it won’t give you too much power.

Camera

The camera is not that great but not so bad either. I would rank it as a medium-range smartphone camera. OmniVision 13MP camera (physical 8.0MP, upgraded to 13MP with software) says Elephone. It also supports 1080p video recording. A variety of shooting modes like sunset, landscape and portrait are supported. And various filters in black and white, cameo, neon, etc, fun techniques like Smile Snapshot, Picture in Picture Mode and more, so obviously picture taking is more interesting.

Battery Life

You hardly find smartphones with awesome battery life, and this phone isn’t one. It has a very good battery life but not awesome. The idle times were amazing, better than my Note 4’s. The Elephone M1 lasted for 3 and a half days without charging while in the end I had 2hours and 30minutes of SOT. The M1 has two power saving modes , one is for intelligent power saving standby which means when the phone is idle it consumes way less energy and there is also the Battery Saver Mode which reduces the device’s performance and limits vibration and background processes.

Conclusion

Overall the Elephone M1 is an almost perfect smartphone, despite the beautiful elegant look with its all metal body design it also has an awesome display, a very good speaker, quite good back camera, great battery life and the performance is great. Don’t forget the awesome fingerprint scanner which is located in the back of the device. The only drawbacks I found on the M1 were the front camera and the lack of customizations on the System. Elephones UI (Interface) does a really good job of keeping up the performance. I would also like to point out that the M1 has a two slots one for SIM and one for microSD card up to 128GB, but you can also have two SIM cards instead. If you care about aesthetics then this smartphone is for you because it can combine enough performance for many different tasks and also having a smartphone that others will be jealous about. The best price I could find was at Geekbuying which they have it for $130. I think it’s a great deal since the phone it solid as rock and the performance brilliant in light to medium tasks.

You can read the full review here : http://goo.gl/JTYcmW