Elephone P5000
Elephone is not a brand we’ve come across in the UK before. This is a grey-market phone shipped to us from Coolicool.com. For further details on grey market tech see our feature on page 96.
Given that massive 5350mAh battery, we were expecting the Elephone P5000 to be very big and bulky. And clearly it is heavier and chunkier than rival 5in-screen smartphones, but at 206g and 9.3mm nowhere near as much as you might imagine.
In design, the P5000 looks exactly like a Samsung Galaxy device, and it even has a fingerprint sensor built into the Home button. Available in black or white with a silver-painted trim, this Android KitKat-powered slab feels sturdy and unbreakable, despite its removable plastic rear panel.
You’ll find a Micro-USB charging port and headphone jack at the top, power and volume on the right side, and dual speakers at the bottom. A 16Mp camera with LED flash sits at the back, but there’s no dedicated camera button.
A 5in full-HD IPS screen adorns the P5000, with a pixel density of 440ppi. We found it a little odd looking at an IPS screen on what felt like a Samsung phone, more used to seeing Samsung’s favoured Super AMOLED in such a scenario. The display is clear and with excellent viewing angles and true-to-life colours.
Don’t be fooled by the fact this smartphone has an octa-core processor; the 1.7GHz MediaTek MT6592 when paired with 2GB of RAM and Mali-450 graphics offered mid-range performance in our benchmarks. We also found the top half of the phone could become warm in use, even when all we were doing was using the camera.
The Elephone is fitted with 16GB of storage as standard, plus you can add a microSD card up to 64GB in capacity.
The battery is the key selling point of this phone. Not only does it offer around twice the capacity of standard Android phones at 5350mAh, but the P5000 supports OTG (On-The-Go). This means that, using the supplied adaptor, you can create a Micro-USB to Micro- USB cable and attach it to another smartphone (or hard drive) and, if you’re feeling really generous, use the Elephone as a power bank. We tried this with our HTC Desire Eye, which also supports OTG.
A concern with large-capacity batteries such as this is that they will take forever to recharge. Not so with the Elephone P5000: given the correct charger it can fill its own battery up to 70 percent in one hour.
We do have some concerns regarding this super four-day (45-day standby) mega battery, however. On receiving the phone from Coolicool, the battery was flat. We charged it up, put it back into the box for a day, and when we took it out again to review the phone the battery was once again completely flat. We recharged and factory reset the phone, and battery performance seems better since, but it’s not at all what we were expecting.
Left on standby, the P5000 consumes next to no power. Following the last charge we left it on standby for eight hours and returned to find it at 100 percent.
A key consideration when buying phones from overseas is whether they are compatible with UK networks. The P5000 operates on 850/900/1800/1900MHz 2G and 900/1900/2100MHz 3G, which means it will be compatible with EE, Three, Vodafone and O2’s 2G and 3G networks. There is no 4G support.
As with many phones bought overseas, the Elephone supports dual SIMs (see our feature on page 100). This is becoming increasingly attractive in the UK, allowing you to separate work and pleasure, yet carry just the one phone.
The fingerprint scanner is swipe-operated, and we had to swipe really slowly to get it to recognise a fingerprint. Samsung has used a touch fingerprint scanner (like Apple’s TouchID) on its new Galaxy S6, which seems like a better approach.
As well as the aforementioned OTG support, the Elephone P5000 also boasts 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 4.0, NFC and GPS.
An 8Mp camera is fitted to the front of the P5000, which is useful for selfies and video chat. It has a Face Beauty mode, although it doesn’t offer a live preview.
On the rear is a 16Mp camera with an LED flash. There’s support for HDR mode, face detection, smile shot, a 40-picture burst mode, and more. Video recording is supported at 1080p.
The P5000 runs Android 4.4.2, with few additions. Several useful gestures are supported, although switched off by default. From the lock screen you can double-tap to wake the phone, or draw a letter or swipe in a particular direction to open an app of your choosing.
Verdict
On paper the Elephone P5000 is a great phone at an attractive price. In reality, the battery life isn’t as good as we had hoped, and the fingerprint scanner was sufficiently annoying to use that we probably wouldn’t bother.