Video: Elephone P9000 GPS Test (no SIM, no WiFi)

Recently, a GizChina reader posed an interesting situation: testing a phone’s GPS without ANY network connected to it (besides GPS satellites).

We took the all new Elephone P9000 that just landed at the GizChina office to test the phone in the exact fashion, and results are here for all to see.

Elephone P9000 GPS Test: No SIM, no WiFi

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As you can see from the video, the P9000 has some good GPS hardware. To make things tougher for the phone, we did not connect to GPS any time before the test so the .conf files could be overwritten.

Evidently, the Elephone P9000 has some impressive GPS functionality.

If you haven’t been around lately, you would be excited to know that the P9000 is one of the first (if not the first) MediaTek Helio P10 MT6755 phones. It only landed in our hands last night, but we’ve already posted a hands-on article and an unboxing video with it.

What do you think of the phone’s GPS capabilities?

Disclaimer: We may be compensated by some of the companies whose products we talk about, but our articles and reviews are always our honest opinions. For more details, you can check out our editorial guidelines and learn about how we use affiliate links.

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Yash Garg
Yash is a blogger by profession, builder of things by passion and foodie by birth. You'll usually find him talking about technology, music, travel and the game of cricket on the streets of Pune when not busy writing or speeding his way through the country! Read more on retro handheld gaming on RETRO91
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balcobomber25
February 9, 2016
Looks good so far. Could this finally be the phone that Elephone have been promising for so long?
- JudikJ7
  February 9, 2016
  - Frank
    February 11, 2016
    A true cold fix takes at least 12,5 minutes, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_to_first_fix thus a fix in 6 sec is impossible. There is some trick behind this figure, such as obtaining the A-GPRS data without GPS being turned on. If you really want to check the GPS it must be tested whithout the data connection ever being active.
- Joel Adames
  February 9, 2016
  ok, well soon enough we will be seeing pigs and cows raing from the skyes hahahaha as that was when i though those ELEPHONE guys would get better,
  so better late that sorry for ELEPHONE !!!
  - balcobomber25
    February 9, 2016
    IF Elephone can create a good device I will be the first to give them props after all the trash I talk about them. BUT that means a good device with no build quality issues and full support for at least a year.
    - MaxPower
      February 9, 2016
      - balcobomber25
        February 9, 2016
        Lol. We still have a ways to go before we have to worry about that. I wanna see if their quality really has improved, what looks good now might not a few months from now.
        
        MaxPower
        February 9, 2016
        True that, but looking at this phone I’d say they are moving in the right direction.
        Now it’s all about software and support. I’m extremely demanding over this.
        you hear people talking about CM ROM like it’s the best Rom out there.
        Personally I think it’s crap, and MIUI is far superior (the only bug I had with MIUI was about the camera app and problems with focus which was fixed a month later while I had several “bad” issues with the OP1 that haven’t still been fixed)
        Now try to picture what Elephone is supposed to do to buy me in!
        balcobomber25
        February 9, 2016
        Elephone is halfway there. They offer good specs and pretty good designs, personally I think the rear of this one looks like a cheap knock off a OP1, but the rest have been pretty good. But their software, support and quality has been terrible. And those are 3 things which often times consumers don’t realize till it’s too late.
    - Razor
      February 10, 2016
      Hmm, Elephone is claiming that this phone has 7000 series aluminum. Same as iphone 6s and samsung galaxy s6/edge. and with CNC aluminum milling, Build quality should not be an issue. Of course software and customer support is more important and elephone needs to provide that.
      - balcobomber25
        February 10, 2016
        It very well could be but without knowing the exact alloy used it doesn’t tell us much. If I had to guess I would say they are actually using 6000 series aluminum (6061 or 6003) used in the previous iPhone 6. It is commonly referred to as “aircraft grade aluminum” It is cheaper and easier to work with.
        
        Razor
        February 10, 2016
        Unless Elephone is lying about which aluminum alloy they’re using. But Elephone claims they’re using 7075 aluminum alloy, which is the best and strongest aluminum alloy metal available.
        Source-http://www.elephone.hk/P9000?v=Craftsmanship
        balcobomber25
        February 10, 2016
        First they say they use 7075 and then they say they use “Xeon Metal which is the same as Aircraft Grade”. I have never heard of Xeon metal before, maybe it is their supplier for their Aluminum.
Renato
February 9, 2016
- - princetom
    February 11, 2016
    Andy, will love to see you measure the bezzel of this phone as elephone claim is 1.6mm. Same as letv max.

lesmil
February 9, 2016
Cheers Andi 🙂
realjjj
February 9, 2016
Does this thing have wifi ac? Can’t find any mention of it and the P10 appears not to have integrated ac.
- balcobomber25
  February 9, 2016
  - realjjj
    February 9, 2016
    X10 with external , x20 integrated but only 1 stream. They need to do better that 1 stream in X30 and ofc the P20 better have at least 1 stream.
    Last year Jiayu S3 and some other of the early models had ac and i ended up assuming it’s a given.
    - balcobomber25
      February 9, 2016
      - Joel Adames
        February 9, 2016
        Dual band wifi, basically twice the speed and often more.
        Joel Adames
        February 9, 2016
        Is that that the same as 2.5ghz+5.0ghz WiFi ?
        
        Karly Johnston
        February 10, 2016
        5ghz is the fastest. 2.4ghz is slower but has more range.
        balcobomber25
        February 10, 2016
        Many routers or wifi cards will have both 2.4 and 5ghz capability so they can operate on N or AC (or a, b, g). 5 has a much shorter range but much higher throughput.
        balcobomber25
        February 9, 2016
        AC is not dual band, it operates only on 5Ghz. N operates on both 2.4 and 5.
        balcobomber25
        February 9, 2016
        A wifi standard that improves upon N, it offers a much higher theoretical speed.
- Roberto Tomás
  February 9, 2016
  no it does not, even though the wifi controller in the Helio P10 supports it. They did not include a 5Ghz antenna for some reason.
  - balcobomber25
    February 9, 2016
    According to Mediatek’s website the wifi controller of the P10 only supports A,B,G and N.
    - Roberto Tomás
      February 9, 2016
      looking at my browsing history, I apparently accidentally clicked the link to the X20 instead of the P10 … I actually did check before posting… I just got the wrong page.
      However, I will say .. that page desn’t explicitly say that it does NOT support wifi AC. It just doesn’t list it with the other (all 2.4Ghz) bands. i mean, Im sure that it doesn’t support AC. Just saying, that wasn’t a complete reference.
      - balcobomber25
        February 9, 2016
- Joel Adames
  February 9, 2016
  - realjjj
    February 10, 2016
    It’s a wifi standard that’s been around for a few years and offers much higher speeds.
    This year wifi ad is taking off, aimed at very high speed but very short range since it has troubles penetrating through walls.
    And soon there will be wifi ah ,aimed at IoT with very long range and a huge number on devices able to connect to a single access point but very with low speeds.
- Alar Mäerand
  April 17, 2016
  N performing pretty badly sadly: ( with my Asus router I can get around 120Mbit/sec up and own with speed test and with P9000 I get max 70Mbit/sec – not sure what is the blocker. Tried both 5GHz and 2.4GHz… With computer I can get easily ~290Mbit/sec up and down with same wifi ( 300 is my speed limit by service provider)

Yeti hand
February 9, 2016
wait for the people stucked in 2012 coming here to say mediatek is notorious for the bad gps performance 😛
- MaxPower
  February 9, 2016
  Well said my friend.
  I was going to say the same thing but you already did it and in a better way.
  - Yeti hand
    February 9, 2016
- balcobomber25
  February 9, 2016
  I am sure we will get some of the Qualcomm fanboys in here saying just that. We usually do.
  - Nolan
    February 10, 2016
    Not a single one so far, eh?
    But I do see some other regular folks (a.k.a clandestine MediaTek fanboys and QC haters) eating from the same bag of dicks while standing in a feverish circle jerk.
    You see them too, don’t you? I’ll bet you do. 😉
    - balcobomber25
      February 10, 2016
      Speaking of the Qualcomm fanboy. He is here.
      I don’t see any QC haters, I see a bunch of people that have no allegiance to chip companies and appreciate what both do.

balcobomber25
February 9, 2016
Looks good so far. Could this finally be the phone that Elephone have been promising for so long?
- JudikJ7
  February 9, 2016
  It seems and wow that was fast for a GPS-only fix
- Joel Adames
  February 9, 2016
  ok, well soon enough we will be seeing pigs and cows raing from the skyes hahahaha as that was when i though those ELEPHONE guys would get better,
  so better late that sorry for ELEPHONE !!!
- balcobomber25
  February 9, 2016
  IF Elephone can create a good device I will be the first to give them props after all the trash I talk about them. BUT that means a good device with no build quality issues and full support for at least a year.
- MaxPower
  February 9, 2016
  Could you imagine the harassment we would get from that hexadecimal guy?
- balcobomber25
  February 9, 2016
  Lol. We still have a ways to go before we have to worry about that. I wanna see if their quality really has improved, what looks good now might not a few months from now.
- MaxPower
  February 10, 2016
  True that, but looking at this phone I’d say they are moving in the right direction.
  Now it’s all about software and support. I’m extremely demanding over this.
  you hear people talking about CM ROM like it’s the best Rom out there.
  Personally I think it’s crap, and MIUI is far superior (the only bug I had with MIUI was about the camera app and problems with focus which was fixed a month later while I had several “bad” issues with the OP1 that haven’t still been fixed)
  Now try to picture what Elephone is supposed to do to buy me in!
- balcobomber25
  February 10, 2016
  Elephone is halfway there. They offer good specs and pretty good designs, personally I think the rear of this one looks like a cheap knock off a OP1, but the rest have been pretty good. But their software, support and quality has been terrible. And those are 3 things which often times consumers don’t realize till it’s too late.
- Razor
  February 10, 2016
  Hmm, Elephone is claiming that this phone has 7000 series aluminum. Same as iphone 6s and samsung galaxy s6/edge. and with CNC aluminum milling, Build quality should not be an issue. Of course software and customer support is more important and elephone needs to provide that.
- balcobomber25
  February 10, 2016
  It very well could be but without knowing the exact alloy used it doesn’t tell us much. If I had to guess I would say they are actually using 6000 series aluminum (6061 or 6003) used in the previous iPhone 6. It is commonly referred to as “aircraft grade aluminum” It is cheaper and easier to work with.
- Razor
  February 10, 2016
  Unless Elephone is lying about which aluminum alloy they’re using. But Elephone claims they’re using 7075 aluminum alloy, which is the best and strongest aluminum alloy metal available.
  Source-http://www.elephone.hk/P9000?v=Craftsmanship
- balcobomber25
  February 10, 2016
  First they say they use 7075 and then they say they use “Xeon Metal which is the same as Aircraft Grade”. I have never heard of Xeon metal before, maybe it is their supplier for their Aluminum.
- Guest
  February 11, 2016
  A true cold fix takes at least 12,5 minutes, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_to_first_fix thus a fix in 6 sec is impossible. There is some trick behind this figure, such as obtaining the A-GPRS data without GPS being turned on. If you really want to check the GPS it must be tested whithout the data connection ever being active.

Renato
February 9, 2016
- Andi Sykes
  February 10, 2016
  yup, or onscreen buttons.
- princetom
  February 11, 2016
  Andy, will love to see you measure the bezzel of this phone as elephone claim is 1.6mm. Same as letv max.
Guest
February 9, 2016
Cheers Andi 🙂
realjjj
February 9, 2016
Does this thing have wifi ac? Can’t find any mention of it and the P10 appears not to have integrated ac.
Edit: lol i never noticed how many of these phones don’t have wifi ac, assumed that pretty much all that are not very cheap do have it since it’s rather crazy not to. And i was hoping for more going 2 streams soon. They got Cat 6 but no decent wifi……
- balcobomber25
  February 9, 2016
  X10 and X20 both support it.
- realjjj
  February 9, 2016
  X10 with external , x20 integrated but only 1 stream. They need to do better that 1 stream in X30 and ofc the P20 better have at least 1 stream.
  Last year Jiayu S3 and some other of the early models had ac and i ended up assuming it’s a given.
  Qualcomm has ac in the 615 and 617.
- Roberto Tomás
  February 9, 2016
  no it does not, even though the wifi controller in the Helio P10 supports it. They did not include a 5Ghz antenna for some reason.
- balcobomber25
  February 9, 2016
  The 615 is also only 1 stream.
- Joel Adames
  February 9, 2016
- what is that ac you talk about???? i’m an uneducated in certain matters
- Guest
  February 9, 2016
- Is that that the same as 2.5ghz+5.0ghz WiFi ?
- balcobomber25
  February 9, 2016
  A wifi standard that improves upon N, it offers a much higher theoretical speed.
- balcobomber25
  February 9, 2016
  AC is not dual band, it operates only on 5Ghz. N operates on both 2.4 and 5.
- balcobomber25
  February 9, 2016
  According to Mediatek’s website the wifi controller of the P10 only supports A,B,G and N.
  http://mediatek-helio.com/p10/
- Roberto Tomás
  February 10, 2016
  looking at my browsing history, I apparently accidentally clicked the link to the X20 instead of the P10 … I actually did check before posting… I just got the wrong page.
  However, I will say .. that page desn’t explicitly say that it does NOT support wifi AC. It just doesn’t list it with the other (all 2.4Ghz) bands. i mean, Im sure that it doesn’t support AC. Just saying, that wasn’t a complete reference.
- balcobomber25
  February 10, 2016
  It could support it but it would need an additional modem.
- Karly Johnston
  February 10, 2016
  5ghz is the fastest. 2.4ghz is slower but has more range.
- realjjj
  February 10, 2016
  It’s a wifi standard that’s been around for a few years and offers much higher speeds.
  This year wifi ad is taking off, aimed at very high speed but very short range since it has troubles penetrating through walls.
  And soon there will be wifi ah ,aimed at IoT with very long range and a huge number on devices able to connect to a single access point but at very low speed.
- balcobomber25
  February 10, 2016
  Many routers or wifi cards will have both 2.4 and 5ghz capability so they can operate on N or AC (or a, b, g). 5 has a much shorter range but much higher throughput.
- alarmatwork
  April 17, 2016
  N performing pretty badly sadly: ( with my Asus router and Nexus5 phone I can get around 120Mbit/sec up and own with speed test and with P9000 I get max 70Mbit/sec – not sure what is the blocker. Tried both 5GHz and 2.4GHz… With computer I can get easily ~290Mbit/sec up and down with same wifi ( 300 is my speed limit by service provider)

Yeti hand
February 9, 2016
wait for the people stucked in 2012 coming here to say mediatek is notorious for the bad gps performance 😛
- MaxPower
  February 9, 2016
  Well said my friend.
  I was going to say the same thing but you already did it and in a better way.
- balcobomber25
  February 9, 2016
  I am sure we will get some of the Qualcomm fanboys in here saying just that. We usually do.
- Yeti hand
  February 10, 2016
  you taught me well sensei 😀
- Guest
  February 10, 2016
  Not a single one so far, eh?
  But I do see some other regular folks (a.k.a clandestine MediaTek fanboys and QC haters) eating from the same bag of dicks while standing in a feverish circle jerk.
  You see them too, don’t you? I’ll bet you do. 😉
- balcobomber25
  February 10, 2016
  Speaking of the Qualcomm fanboy. He is here.
  I don’t see any QC haters, I see a bunch of people that have no allegiance to chip companies and appreciate what both do.

hans
February 9, 2016
what is your impression about daytime visibility of the screen ??
Guest
February 10, 2016
what is your impression about daytime visibility of the screen ??
Toby
February 10, 2016
@Gizchina:disqus Thank you very much Andi! (Replied in the other comments section on the first impressions post as well). This is awesome!
Guest
February 10, 2016
@Gizchina:disqus Thank you very much Andi! (Replied in the other comments section on the first impressions post as well). This is awesome!

Brooklyn701
February 10, 2016
As much as GPS is good and it has other impressive features (don’t give a rats ass if it has Wifi AC Standard or not), the one Button (or onscreen) solution is a super turn off. As well as not being able to use two SIMs with a SD card at the same time….
Guest
February 10, 2016
As much as GPS is good and it has other impressive features (don’t give a rats ass if it has Wifi AC Standard or not), the one Button (or onscreen) solution is a super turn off. As well as not being able to use two SIMs with a SD card at the same time….

Alar Mäerand
April 15, 2016
I have tested GPS in Europe – I did side by side GPS tracking test with Nexus5 and I must tell that saved GPS track looked much better on Nexus5 because P9000 got lost very often and jumped from here to there and left not very smooth track line. Also difference in the distance was huge on 6km track. I hope Elephone will address this issue soon!

alarmatwork
April 15, 2016
I have tested GPS in Europe – I did side by side GPS tracking test with Nexus5 and I must tell that saved GPS track looked much better on Nexus5 because P9000 got lost very often and jumped from here to there and left not very smooth track line. Also difference in the distance was huge on 6km track. I hope Elephone will address this issue soon!

John Nash
May 21, 2016
This video shows the GPS working well but this is not my experience. I am having GPS problems on my Elephone P9000 in the UK.
I mostly want to use the GPS to track my running. It will pick up the satellites quickly (as shown in this video) but quickly loses them as soon as I start moving. This is making the phone almost useless for any running app.
At the moment I’m also wearing a Microsoft Band 2 which has it’s own built-in GPS and I’m using fitbit or endomondo on the elephone P9000. I’m therefore getting side by side comparisons of my routes (Microsoft band 2 GPS versus Elephone P9000 GPS). The Elephone P9000 GPS tracking, zig zags a bit (as it loses GPS signal) and has even tracked me going in a small circle when I was in fact going straight up my road! This is resulting in the P9000 showing my distances as much further than they actually are (due to zig zag/errors). Conversely, the Microsoft Band 2 holds it GPS signal much better and the track it shows much more accurately shows where I’ve walked/run.
I’m frustrated as I’ve only just got this phone and was previously ( up to end of April 2016) using an LG G2 running Fitbit / Endomondo without this problem. The moment I changed to the Elephone P9000 both applications started showing these problems.
I’ve tried the GPS fixes, e.g. getting an app to reset the GPS and download a fresh AGPS table before starting up but this does not seem to help at all.
I hope Elephone can fix this P9000 GPS problem as without this I may need to go back to my LG G2 for my running.
It’s also such a shame as apart from this issue I’m really pleased with the phone.
- Ray
  June 18, 2016
  - Singhapura
    June 22, 2016
    I had no problem in Singapore but after moving to the UK, I have the same issues you describe John.
John Nash
May 21, 2016
This video shows the GPS working well but this is not my experience. I am having GPS problems on my Elephone P9000 in the UK.
I mostly want to use the GPS to track my running. It will pick up the satellites quickly (as shown in this video) but quickly loses them as soon as I start moving. This is making the phone almost useless for any running app.
At the moment I’m also wearing a Microsoft Band 2 which has it’s own built-in GPS and I’m using fitbit or endomondo on the elephone P9000. I’m therefore getting side by side comparisons of my routes (Microsoft band 2 GPS versus Elephone P9000 GPS). The Elephone P9000 GPS tracking, zig zags a bit (as it loses GPS signal) and has even tracked me going in a small circle when I was in fact going straight up my road! This is resulting in the P9000 showing my distances as much further than they actually are (due to zig zag/errors). Conversely, the Microsoft Band 2 holds it GPS signal much better and the track it shows much more accurately shows where I’ve walked/run.
I’m frustrated as I’ve only just got this phone and was previously ( up to end of April 2016) using an LG G2 running Fitbit / Endomondo without this problem. The moment I changed to the Elephone P9000 both applications started showing these problems.
I’ve tried the GPS fixes, e.g. getting an app to reset the GPS and download a fresh AGPS table before starting up but this does not seem to help at all.
I hope Elephone can fix this P9000 GPS problem as without this I may need to go back to my LG G2 for my running.
It’s also such a shame as apart from this issue I’m really pleased with the phone.
- Guest
  June 18, 2016
  I have exactly the same problem!
- Singhapura
  June 22, 2016
  I had no problem in Singapore but after moving to the UK, I have the same issues you describe John.

Elephone P9000 GPS Test: No SIM, no WiFi

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