I have been following the Chinese phone market for some time now and it seems that Chinese manufacturers are making fast improvement on the quality of the products they deliver. 2 years ago on my last visit to china most of the phones on sale where either bad knock offs based on the iPhone design or the regular famous brands.
Today however it’s a completely different story! You have all kinds of new models entering the Chinese market from smaller manufacturers that are trying to make a name for them self, offering great value for a low price! Great news for us!
With that in mind I decided I wanted to buy a Chinese phone with a budget of around $200. After looking over the options I quickly came up withe a short list of phones including the Neo N003, iOcean X7 and Zopo C2. All of which are 5-inch, 1080 phones with quad-core Mediatek SoC.
Unfortunatly the Neo N003 launch date happens to be the day before I am leaving China which meant I had to look at the X7 and C2. In the end I decided to buy the iOcean X7 as I prefered the design and also the lower (999 Yuan) price tag!
After ordering online true the official website it took only 3 days from order/payment to delivery and have been using the phone for about a week now.
iOcean X7 Youth Hands-on
iOcean X7 Youth Specifications
[komper pid=13 compareform=no]Build quality
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Despite being made mostly from plastic the phone does feels solid, with just a are few minor imperfections. For example, the tabs with hold the back panel in place feel a little bit cheap and flimsy and should be handled with care.
Also there seems to be a very small gap between the display and the border that looks to me like it will collect some dust with time.
Display
The X7 features an impressive 5-inch full HD display with a resolution of 1920 x 1080 that produces a very beautiful and crisp image, the colors are accurate and not overly saturated
The only negative thing that is noticeable is the slight backlight bleed on the bottom corners..
Performance
The Mediatek quad-core performs adequately and the few games I have played ran smoothly, I do notice that when browsing on the internet the FHD display does need a lot of power and the response isn’t always super smooth there.
iOcean X7 photo samples
Here are some photo samples taken with the iOcean X7’s rear camera.
Conclusion
You cant expect to get the features of a Samsung S4 but u do get a lot of phone for 160$ that will entertain most if not all your needs.
[templatic_contentbox type=”author” title=”About the Author”] Kristof Heymans is a 30 year old engineer from Belgium with an interest in multimedia and IT . And currently on a 7 week vacation/ family visit in China. [/templatic_contentbox]
Congratz Kristof, thank you for your very honest review.
We need at least 1.5Ghz Mediatek MT6589T Quad for 1080p, 1.2 Ghz is enough for up to 720p.
True, I guess the new SoC MT6290 will solve this issue.
whats the GPS like ?
GPS is wonky on the first firmware, but solved in the update, currently at 20052013 version. Satellite lock is a bit slow IF compare to my aging HTC Desire HD.
The article speakson a pricetag of $165 but the spec sheet $ 225.
That is a big difference is there an explination for it
This phone was bought in China at 999 Yuan. International customers will face higher prices
Thanks for the review. Is it possible to install apps to an SD card? (The External SD card that you put in the slot under the back cover as opposed to the internal SD card – hope that makes sense)
I would say yes because it’s standard in android and otherwise u could always install link2sd to do the trick.
IM LOOKING FORWARD TO BUY THIS PHONE. CAN U PLZ TEMME ABT ITS BATTERY LIFE?
Battery life is roughly between 8-10 hours for full HSDPA connected, some WiFi and some phone call.
I think it is time that Andi or someone there should open store or just some sending service with smaller provision like 10-20 $. Now we pay up to 100$ to these resellers for just packing phone and send it to us. We often see complaints for these expensive packing services. What do you say Andi?
I agree, I would love to see that
+100000
Actually this has been discussed before and I would rather pay Andi the extra $100 than the other resellers but I don’t think this is his area of interest. No pressure Andi!!
Shipping is the big problem. If I ever manage to find a way around all the shipping regulations, which doesn’t increase customers costs to much I’ll think about it 🙂
Please do it Andi. We know you can do it.
Agree with Andi, as shipping is increasing fast as ever (i work at a local postage company here). They need to fight with those big player such UPS, DHL etc with small margin but they don’t get volume. Sometime we do share frieght with DHL to save some cost there. So, a 10 to 20 dollar margin is not feasible economically. Unless, we could pick a bulk order, said 100 pieces then we can get a better margin on the phone price itself.
The gps needs a bit of time to acquire a connection, a prob that also seems to occur with other mt6589 phones.
U can install ur games and apps on the sd card like.
I can get true the day easily with 3g and sync active plus some light browsing.
Also according to antutu the rear cam is 13 Mp.
As said before by Andi, when u buy directly from the Chinese manufacturer or their Chinese partners u get a lower price.
This review is so shallow… =(
Hi. I have found many different information about 3g bands on this phone.
I’m looking at band 850 because in Argentina we use that one and 1900 which is almost impossible to get with a chinese phone.
Most of the places i’ve looked at mention for the X7 to have 900/2100 or just 2100 and here it says 850/2100. Which one is true?
Thanks in advance
pls.comment about battery life.thanks
The 200 mAh battery scores 483 in Antutu benchmark, if you like streaming movies from the internet watching a 120min HD movie on the Youth X7 will drop the 200 mAh battery down from 100% to roughly 60%, it will be worse on the X7 Elite because of the higher clock speed and added memory, I just ordered a 300 mAh battery which fits both models.
Some people seems to tell that these phone support 900 MHz 3G.
Can u give us a screenshot of the engineering menu with frenquencies pls…
MTK6589 can support
GSM 850/900/1800/1900 MHz (2.5G) sim1 slot
WCDMA 850/2100MHz (3G) sim2 slot
This is written on the inside of the battery compartment.
after playing around with the iocean x7 for 10min in a shop. My impressions are as follow:-
1. damn stunning screen
2. so so building quality (plastic-ky) and looks cheap at the corners as mentioned in the review. it’s a bit thicker than the look due to the back cover a bit pop out from the phone.
3. screen sensitivity a bit sluggish (one hand tested using google map – zoom in-out, rotate, scroll)
ps. #3 is a standard test i perform now before buying any phone. unfortunately a lot of the chinese phones fails by either being sluggish or “jumpy”. Even on same models, some phones have ok sensitivity while others are crap. i think this has to do with either poor calibration or improper grounding of the screen element.