Vernee have been a breath of fresh air on the smartphone scene. The company have made a couple really nice phones, the Apollo Lite and the Thor, both of which continue to do well. In fact, the Apollo Lite is still my ‘fallback’ phone!
It’s the last month of 2016 and the company seem ready to start sending out Apollo (minus the Lite). They’re saying it’s the world’s first ‘built for VR flagship’, and it’s also going to come with a VR headset in the box.
Gizchina News of the week
The Apollo features a design that’s a bit more generic than the Apollo Lite, but from photos it appears as though the Apollo is made out of much higher-grade metal than that used on the Lite. Vernee revealed in a press release today that the phone was engineered after a total of 300+ machine processes, which is a fair bit indeed!
The metal ratio on the phone (i.e., the ratio of volume metal to the total volume of all material) is almost 98%. While I’m not aware of how much it is on other phones, this sounds like a seriously high ratio — good or otherwise.
More about the phone can be learnt here, and you can purchase one for yourself this Christmas (for $249) here.
I am pretty much sick of all of this Vernee bullshits by now. Why should I be interested to know how much machining processes they use to kraft the phone body? It only tells me how much energy is wasted doing so.
& always bullshits no matter what products it is; from far more quality charger that is actually lower quality than compared one to the mediocre phones. Really VR experience with weak GPU on the X20? Get a grip of your self, even X30 won’t be capable for it A530 is a bare minimum & even it won’t provide charming experience either.
I had the opportunity to compare redmi note 4 to vernee apollo lite side by side, and I’m sorry to say that in almost everything but body shape, apollo lite won handily. camera quality? check. charge speed? check. os fluidity? check. I just wish that apollo lite was lighter and didn’t have slightly pointed edges.
I agree on your “it’s too weak for VR point”, but I’m pretty sure you absolutely don’t know what you’re talking about when you talked about charger and whatnot lol.
Let’s elaborate.
Apolo lite have very bad quality eMMC NAND certainly not comparable to the Samsung & Toshiba ones Xiaomi mostly use, this naturally leads to slower apps cold startup times & there for worser user experience. Camera quality neither is very good for anything much than good lite photos & Xiaomi misses less regarding focus, I know Xiaomi at least sorts out this kind of problems in firmware updates. You can’t compare 25% bigger battery with regular 2A charger charging speed with smaller one & fast charger by the way Apollo Lite have serious problems with idle power consumption (doesn’t get in arm Idle states at all). OS fluidity; all do MIUI is very hardly skinned & heavy compared to AOSP (Vernee uses it with little modification) I still find it very fluid, naturally not as the HTC Sense UI or AOSP & CM so Vernee might had a lead there but with mentioned eMMC I am actually pretty sure it’s slower & less fluid. Apolo lite also sufferes from pore audio quality and audio formats suport. WiFi speeds are also on the down side.
Source:
http://www.cnx-software.com/2016/09/11/vernee-apollo-lite-helio-x20-smartphone-review-part-2-android-6-0-firmware/
I don’t like current Redmi 4 Note nor X2x SoC-s, we will see what they cooked for the India.
I actively do know what I am talking about when I do which I probably couldn’t say about you but well OK, prove me wrong if you can.
Regarding charger read opinions:
https://www.gizchina.com/2016/05/04/vernee/
Best regards.
hahaha bad quality eh? it’s bad enough that there’s practically no time lag between touching and launching the app, practically instant.
mine doesn’t have idle problem at all. it would last for days if I don’t touch it. source for that again.
camera quality is very good if you use 3rd party app like camefar-fv5. far better than reno4.
lol you’re “pretty sure” eh, so you haven’t actually used it but commented on it anyway hahahahahaha. what a joke.
I don’t care enough to “prove you wrong”. the thing is getting support from communities and will be getting a lot of custom rom anyway. whatever you’re doing won’t affect it, so whatever lol.
regarding charger: so you don’t even have it on hands and, haven’t even tested, yet able to conclusively said it hahahahahaha. total effin’ joke lol.
Honey do the DiscoMark (5 runs standard) test, for usual apps including heavy ones like Chrome and Google Maps include & camera app and settings, afterword post them hire & I will give you a comparison material to the Xiaomi Mi Max that I own.
Reed the rewiev regarding idling power consumption.
They culd have fixed that in the meantime with software patch. By the way how much does it consume over night? Mi Mix consumes between 0 to 2% but that isn’t compatible as it have 4850 mAh battery.
Then again quality of photos taken with Max (& every other newer Xiaomi) also improves much if you use Open Camera on Camera 2 API but you must enable hal for it in build.prop (or init if you wish), Xiaomi doesn’t use Camera API 2 as it’s camera app suport only original (initial) camera API (even camera API 2 & hal for it are fully supported). Still results are the best at good quality in moderate Lightning conditions.
Joke is on you entirely! I am certain you used Xiaomi long enough that you are making comparisons to anyway.
I am a part of the biggest moddingg communitis for a long time (MoDaCo, Xda) & a developer so don’t have high hopes regarding either long stand software support from Vernee nor from community & the same goes for all MTK based phones, only exception up to date is Yiaju S3 variants with 2+ years of community support and counting. So grow up jackass.
I would like to mention that the Jiayu guys at team M.A.D are now working on the Apollo lite so its going to have pretty heafty support. When it comes to ROMs, I ride with them!
& can you confirm that?
I see only one guy working (Black Manta), two beta ROM’s and not even dedicated thread on XDA.
The thread on the Vernee forums. http://bbs.vernee.cc/forum.php?mod=viewthread&tid=1584&extra=page%3D1&mobile=2
Another vernee board thread. http://verneeapollolite.proboards.com/thread/39/mad-develop-vernee-apollo-lite?page=1&scrollTo=231
Team M.A.D. OFFICIAL FACEBOOK. They just posted a picture of the Apollo lite running android Nougat.
Want to see their kernel git, with out of it I don’t buy it…
Here is their github. https://github.com/MediatekAndroidDevelopers?tab=repositories
Apparently they have ROMs for several phones like the Ulefone Metal and Vernee Thor
Here is their Facebook page where they posted a screenshot of the Apollo lite running 7.1.1 and are taking donations.
Ok. Still I only see the Thor there & not much recent activity for it. It’s still far from a main line with a litle bit of everything. To much cherry picking if you ask me & everything is pretty much partial but considering this is MTK and not CAF probably not to bad all in all.
Still not one of those who believe it before seeing it.
Thanks.
Well most of their links are on their Facebook page. They’ve only announced support for the Apollo lite a week ago and just got a device. As a dev you know how long it usually takes between getting a device and making a stable release.
Unfortunately I do & with much more (favorable) wind blowing into your direction with ironing and tuning & with out much infrastructure to add it still lasts at least 7 months. Just hope they can deliver.
Best regards.
Their first beta has just been uploaded to github. That was fast
From what I’ve seen from forums and reviews, the redmi note blows the Apollo lite out of the water. I tend to lean towards the general consensus vs 1 persons anecdotal evidence. Hopefully the team M.A.D. ROM is good. That’s then only reason I would even consider this phone. If not then I’ll just take a redmi note 3 pro/mi max seeings how the sd650 takes a dump on anything mediatek has ever produced.
You don’t have to believe me, I don’t really care either way lol. Redmi Note 4 IS a good phone though, way better than the R Note 2. My perfect phone would be Apollo Lite’s performance and camera with Note 4’s body and pricing. Make all those mid-high end phones look like a joke lol.
Haven’t tried SD650 yet but it doesn’t really matter when I’ve experienced myself just how fast Helio X20 is, paired with good dual channel ram that is.
At this point the only way I will touch this phone with a 10 foot poll is after Team M.A.D. gets done with their ROM. Until then, redmi 3 pro/mi max all the way for a cheaper price.
I don’t care lol, I don’t have any stake in vernee so do whatever you want.
I never said or implied that you did. I just want to point out a differing opinion. The same way you shared your opinion with Lazar Prodanovic. I’m quite certain he couldn’t care less about how you felt about the two phone. It is, however, a good thing to discuss these matters for people that read the comments for more information.
I don’t care if he doesn’t care lol and I don’t care if you don’t care lol nor I said that you just said or implied it lol. I’m just posting my experiences and not necessarily for you or the other poster personally, this is an open forum after all. You don’t have to reply to this post, or you can, just to have the last say, whatever lol.
Lmao. Yea whatever dude.
I guess this is a sponsored article by Vernee?
Should have been written that it is. Anyway I want see a real and honest review of the device. Getting tired of this PR articles now.
actually am waiting for a full review of the smart phone. I won’t criticize that which I haven’t used. well, I used the helio x10 once on a 2k 5.5″ HTC E9, and all I can say it wasn’t such a bad experience, the power vrg6200 GPU was not that great but it did it’s job. but I never tried VR on it, nor did I do much of gaming on it either. So, now that the X20 has the quad core mali GPU(correct me if am wrong), I’ll be curious to see how it actually handles VR. if it’s fine, then I may consider this phone for the 2K and VR combo experience. Currently I have a xiaomi redmi note 3pro(SD 650), I love it but I also think it’s time to go for 2k again @ a cheap price. I just don’t wanna dive in blind just yet. what do you think?
Think you will have to wait at least for another 2 years (me be even more) before things about mobile VR crystalise as the standard & same goes for the hardware especially in economic segment. Things aren’t quite there even on the PC side even biggest (economic) coalition (MS – Intel) is pushing it hard now, the upcoming CES should bring up numerous projects regarding that with coalition projected standards but we aren’t quite there yet. Regarding Vernee Apollo & it’s VR capabilities I ashore you it’s only a commercial, actually even Kirin 960 with its Mali G71 MP8 is in the bare minimum requirement regarding VR all do its pretty good with Vulkan (Metal test) & thats why I think it have bare minimum for VR in the first place, looks like ARM did put some efforts in to hardware design and also drivers development regarding new API (Vulkan).