[Maze Alpha Questions & Answers] lukesan:
Just a quick introduction why I am writing this.

I've got technical background with a zillion years of experience in the electronics world ... and yes I'm a bit of a tech nerd. I will not go through the list of phones I owned but the last year it were a couple of Huawei's, Samsung S6, S7 etc etc... So I've never had a real 'China' phone and never had one with a MTK chipset and since I got a really nice deal on this one I bought the 6GB/64GB version for a steal.

I will not go through the unboxing since that is the ultimate crap youtube for me. Open the box, take the phone, cable and charger out and throw the box in the cabinet.

I've read people complain about wifi, camera etc and so I wanted to test this on a bit more than what you see is what you get level.

Wifi

: absolutely no issue at all. Works perfectly on my Asus and Linksys 2.4GHz and 5GHz routers. To test this I installed wifi analyser and speed test from the play store. Range, I can see my neighbors wifi as good on the Alpha as on the S7 that is right next to it. Maybe slightly less on the Maze but just a bit.

Throughput. Well not as good as the S7 BUT more than good enough and explainable. The Maze is a single channel and it's max locking speed on 5GHz N is 135Mbps here which results in about 60Mbps download which is the max since it is half duplex. More than good enough for surfing, youtube and whatever.

10 meters further on and behind 1 thick wall I still have about the same speed which is excellent to me.

GPS

: Since everyone was complaining about GPS with these MTK chipsets and since I am very much into GPS this was something I was looking out for to test. Test program used : Androits GPS and Google Maps. Cloudy and in the middle of my garden. Wow, didn't take long, probably 5 to 10 seconds and got a lock on 20 out of 20 visible sats. Ladies and gentlemen, there is more to it than a lock and the amount of sats. A couple of the sats over 40 dB snr and a lot of other in the 30 dB snr which is really good. But then the typical MTK which I saw in other reviews... accuracy 1m ... right. Open Google Maps and I am standing in my neighbors garden, mmm 1m accuracy my ... . After a while it slowly crawled into the correct spot and followed me around when I moved around. So, still a bit of a different behavior than the regular Qualcomm. Also now that I am typing this I didn't see any Beidou sats but I consider the amount of locked more than enough.

camera

: As many have said not really top and especially comparing this to my S7 .. I will not do this. But good enough for posting on social media and a de-noise program on the pc also helped.

fingerprint

: read some comments as 'the screen doesn't come on quickly, there is some delay' djeez, get a life guys. Comparing this to the S6 I had 10 months ago this one works extremely well and very fast.

There are some other things I am noticing and that I am currently checking. The charger that is supplied is a fast charge type, meaning in this case one that has 5V, 9V and 12V output. Well I haven't really drained it down completely yet but I checked the voltage and current. The voltage on my meter showed 5.35 V (which is actually a bit over the 5V default spec) and like 1.9 Amp current. So according to me at this moment the phone doesn't have any real fast charge (yet to test when fully empty, it was at 73%) but the redmi note 4 from my wife also doesn't have this and with a 4000mAh batt it means that it should become full in about 2 h to 2h30 since it should slow down charging above 80 or 90%. I find that more than fast enough since the old Huawei P8 that I tested only charged at 1 Amp max.

Now as some as you said the USB-C connector .... yes, seems a bit strange and 2 of my cables do not really fit well. They charge but the slightest movement and it is a no go, seems the connector is too deep into the device. Now I have a bunch of regular micro usb to c convertors and they are working perfectly. 4 for 1 euro or dollar and that issue is fixed for me.

The FM radio, well reception is not top notch and the stereo, or the lack of it is weird. Standing in the garden I had 1 station that I could hear stereo separation while I know the other ones are also very strong in signal strength and the stereo decoding did not happen. RDS works fine so it must be a threshold setting in the software why stereo did not work as it should. Also you can record FM which is really nice.

As far as the earpiece as I heard people complain about it. Installed my sim and dialed my voicemail. Yes, it should be a bit louder. It is a bit strange because the speaker is at the edge of the device but it sounded 'full' and nice. Maybe if we can root it we can alter the xml with the sound settings and bump it up a little.

4G seemed to work perfectly.

So far my second day of playing around a bit but I actually like it. Now need to get me a Xiaomi silicon case because this thing will eventually get to test Newtons law.