Elephone R9 flaunts its main camera’s design

I’ll share its problems as they happened.

Ordered in March 2015, Elephone P7000, mind you.

Kept getting delayed, so chose Ecoo in April. IT GOT DELAYED TOO! Received it mid May 2015.

Got the phone, opened the box, got rid of the cover protecting the battery cell, installed it in – can’t get the phone to switch on for 15 minutes.

Got frustrated and kept it on charge for a couple minutes, the screen lit up and I got it to switch on.

Same night, left it charging for half an hour, it was super hot from the back, and as I turned on the screen went into static. Wouldn’t turn off from the power button. Had to remove battery to reboot. This was fairly regular, whenever waking the phone up, or when a notification lit the screen up, or while charging. Very annoying because it would reset the date & time and any settings to default.

Told Ecoo that my phone is buggy, they said it’s a minor error in the circuits. BUT THEY WOULDN’T TAKE IT BACK NO MATTER WHAT.

Then more problems showed up, the SoC was a champ, tbh.

MTK6752 > MTK6753. I could play almost any game and it wouldn’t lag or lose/skip any frames at all. But it would heat up after 10 minutes of gameplay. Found that X10 was the real successor to the 6752, similar gameplay experience on the Letv X600.

Screen would flicker from time to time, but it wasn’t noticeable for anyone else.

Which would subsequently cause the battery to drain whenever it hit the early 20’s. So I had to keep it charged well above 70% to get some gaming time.

It would take 2+ hours for a full charge. None of the fast charging methods worked, at all!

Finally, in May I dropped it trying to take it out of my pocket.

Fell vertically, shattering the glass, not the display panel, from the home button in its first fall.

Kept using it until it fell again, cracked open the display a little bit.

Kept using it still, until the screen stopped responding to touch.

Later in July, I took it to Karachi to hope for a repair so I could use it as a backup. It spent the entire night charging, and went missing under mysterious circumstances.

Can’t track it to this day. Tried all tracker services but it either hasn’t been turned on, or maybe someone did a hard-reset.

P.S. If it was selling for $100 now, I’d buy it just for the gaming experience.

I got it in UAE without any import duties, but my friends are Xiaomi fans who keep ordering from GearBest, AliExpress & Banggood. They say it’s better to ask the site staff for help but if you don’t have that option, i.e. there’s a flash sale, priority line, AliExpress shipment, and DHL can bypass most countries’ customs easily.