Elephone P9000

Well, the Elephone P9000 has certainly been a pleasant surprise. Chinese smartphones tend to come in a great deal cheaper than their UK counterparts, but usually with a handful of compromises. With this handset we’re really struggling to find them.

Design

The last Elephone phone we reviewed – the Quad-HD Elephone Vowney – had some great hardware inside, but it looked cheap and nasty in its glossy gold plastic casing. But Elephone, unlike many other phone makers, makes a point of creating different designs for each of its handsets – whereas the Samsungs and Sonys of this world all follow the same basic appearance and are instantly recognisable, the only thing tying together Elephone’s line-up is the shiny silver logo emblazoned on each phone’s rear.

And the P9000 has a nice design, not dissimilar to the OnePlus 2 and yet far from a carbon copy of that smartphone. Like the OP2 it has a rough, sandpaper-like rear case, but it’s not as rough as OnePlus’ example, and neither is it removable. Instead, you pop in the SIM and microSD card (or two SIMs) in a slot-loading tray at the phone’s top left edge.

The rear camera layout is different, with OnePlus placing its dual-LED flash, camera and laser autofocus in a vertical metal strip and Elephone arranging its trio in a horizontal fashion. The P9000’s dual-flash is two-tone, and below the significantly larger and slightly protruding camera glass is a circular fingerprint scanner. By comparison the OnePlus 2’s fingerprint scanner is found on the front in the physical home button, which the P9000 doesn’t even have.

Then there’s the Alert Slider, found on the left edge of the OnePlus 2. The Elephone P9000 also places a button here – more comfortably positioned slightly lower down the case – but its ‘Smart Key’ does more than tone down notifications. An option in the Settings menu lets you customise this button to launch any app you like; only when the Smart Key function is switched off does it function a little like the OP2’s Alert Slider, alternating between vibrate mode and do not disturb. We’ll come back to this phone’s many useful software features later on, though.

Looking at the Elephone P9000 in its own right, it’s a good-looking Android phone – especially at this price. It’s built around a tough metal frame that’s just 7.3mm thick and houses an LG-made LTPS OGS display that has such slim bezels this 5.5in-screen phone feels much smaller and easier to manage than most phablets. Subtle curved edges at the rear make it feel great in the hand, and that sandpaper-like rear does wonders for grip.

The screen itself is bright and vivid, and reasonably good at repelling fingerprints. With a sharp full-HD resolution of 1920x1080 pixels (401ppi) and decent viewing angles it’s perfectly suited to enjoying media such as watching movies and playing games – the hardware inside is up to the job too, as we’ll come to next.

There’s no mention of a protective coating for the screen, however, which is a slight concern – you might want to invest in a case to protect the P9000. The handset otherwise feels tough and well-made.

A key design feature is the Elephone’s default navigation bar setting. Usually Android phones have three buttons that sit below the screen: one takes you to the home screen, one takes you back a step, and one brings up a list of open apps. The P9000 uses an ‘E-touch’ or single-touch button for all three, whereby a single-tap takes you back, a double-tap takes you home, and a long-press opens the multitasking menu. We quickly got used to and liked this feature, but if you can’t get your head around it then it is possible to turn on a traditional three-button navigation bar in the settings.

Twin speaker grilles are found on the phone’s bottom edge, sitting either side of the reversible USB-C charging- and data-transfer port. It’s a step up from cheap phones with rear-mounted speakers that fire sound in completely the wrong direction. There’s also a standard 3.5mm headphone jack at the top, but no headphones are supplied in the box.