I have been following the Chinesephone 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 Chinesephone with a budget of around $200. After looking over the options I quickly came up withe a short list of phones including the Neo N003, iOcean X7 and Zopo C2. All of which are 5-inch, 1080 phones with quad-core Mediatek SoC.
Unfortunatly the Neo N003 launch date happens to be the day before I am leaving China which meant I had to look at the X7 and C2. In the end I decided to buy the iOcean X7 as I prefered the design and also the lower (999 Yuan) price tag!
After ordering online true the official website it took only 3 days from order/payment to delivery and have been using the phone for about a week now.
iOcean X7 Youth Hands-on
iOcean X7 Youth Specifications
[komper pid=13 compareform=no]Build quality
Despite being made mostly from plastic the phone does feels solid, with just a are few minor imperfections. For example, the tabs with hold the back panel in place feel a little bit cheap and flimsy and should be handled with care.
Also there seems to be a very small gap between the display and the border that looks to me like it will collect some dust with time.
Display
The X7 features an impressive 5-inch full HD display with a resolution of 1920 x 1080 that produces a very beautiful and crisp image, the colors are accurate and not overly saturated
The only negative thing that is noticeable is the slight backlight bleed on the bottom corners..
Performance
The Mediatek quad-core performs adequately and the few games I have played ran smoothly, I do notice that when browsing on the internet the FHD display does need a lot of power and the response isn’t always super smooth there.
iOcean X7 photo samples
Here are some photosamples taken with the iOcean X7’s rear camera.
Conclusion
You cant expect to get the features of a Samsung S4 but u do get a lot of phone for 160$ 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]
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.