Elephone had entered India with the launch of Elephone G7 smartphone in July. The Chinese smartphone teamed up with iberry’s Auxus to launch Auxus PRIME P8000 in August. Elephone has launched the Trunk smartphone in China for $119.99 but the device is not yet announced for Indian markets. We have got our hands on the device so let’s take a look at it and see if it worth the price tag.
Design and Hardware
The phone has a 5 inch HD display with a resolution of 1280 x 720 pixels that is good and provides bright colors. The viewing angles and sunlight legibility is also descent and the screen is not very reflective and neither prone to fingerprints. The phone is pretty light and feels compact that makes it easy for one hand handling. It measures 142.5×71.6×8.9mm and weighs 138g. At front the phone has an earpiece that is present in the center. Ambient light and proximity sensors are also present next to the 2MP front facing camera which is not the best but after selecting various options from settings like Auto HDR, HDR, super fine picture quality, the selfies do get better.
There are three capacitive touch buttons on the huge bezels present below the screen. All the buttons have a soft touch white backlight and the home button is circular while the side keys are simple dots.
The power button and volume rockers are present on the right side of the phone.
There are no buttons or keys on the left.
The micro USB port and 3.5mm audio jack are present on top of the phone.
The primary microphone is present below.
There is a 8MP auto focus rear camera at the back along with a LED flash. The Elephone logo is also seen at the center.
The loudspeaker grill is present at the lower back on the left side.
The phone has a plastic body that doesn’t feel much premium however it does makes it lightweight. There are big bezels on top and bottom of the phone but thin bezels are present on either side.
Under the back cover, the phone has two micro SIM card slots along with a micro SD card slot.
The phone has a 2,100mAh removable battery. The build quality is just average and not the best compared to other smartphones in this price range.
Software
The phone runs on Android 5.1.1 and comes with Elephone launcher that is not very good. But you can replace it with any third-party launcher such as Nova and others.
There is no app drawer and all the app comes encompassed in folders as per categories. There are the usual shortcuts in the notification panel that can be re-arranged. There are almost no built in apps on the phone but we think that when the phone will launch in India, it will be bundled with the usual lot. A folder is there on the phone that has all the recently used apps that gets updated automatically depending on the apps you use.
By tapping the capacitive touch button on the left or by simply swiping up, you can open the menu bar that has all the settings related to the customization such as Wallpaper, Personalization, App Widgets, launcher settings, Download Management and System settings of the phone. The phone offers only one local theme but you can download several that are available for free. You can also select from a number of widgets.
The launcher setting does not offer much but you can change the size of the icons on the phone. You can enable or disable the launcher editing status from here and also select any type of animation for the launcher such as spin, cylinder-In, cylinder-on and so on.
Music and FM Radio
The phone has Google Play Music and offers several equalizer options that it calls as Snapdragon Audio+. It even offers other features like Bass boost and Surround sound that are applicable while listening to music over earphones. In case of Radio, you can add up to seven radio stations as favorite and it also offers recording. The loudspeaker quality was clear but the call quality on the phone was low. Audio through third-party earphones were also good.
Out of 16GB of internal storage you get 11.69GB of storage, out of which you get 7.27GB of usable space, while out of 2GB RAM, 1.1GB of RAM is free when the phone is idle with default apps running in the background. You can also move apps to the SD card when you insert one.
The phone has stock Android Lollipop keyboard that is pretty standard and simple to use.
Dual SIM and Connectivity
The phone supports 4G LTE FDD: Band 1/3/7/20 (800 1800 2100 2600) for the Chinese variant and there is no info about the band support for India. The dual SIM cards come with dual standby. It has the usual set of connectivity features including, Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n, Bluetooth 4.0 and GPS.
Camera
The phone comes with a 8MP physical camera with LED flash (13MP interpolated). There are a number of additional settings for the camera such as picture quality that includes, Normal, Fine and Super Fine, Auto HDR, HDR, Face Detection, Selectable Zone Auto and so on. Also present are the usual set of filters. Daylight and macro images are good but not crisp while the photos in low light are not very sharp. Images in HDR mode do add a lot of noise. Selecting the Super Fine mode in the picture quality does offer good photos to some extent.
Check out some camera samples (Click the image for full resolution sample)
Flash
Video
The phone can record videos in 1080p resolution at 30 fps. Check out the video sample.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BF7s6rnyZbM
Performance and Benchmarks
Elephone Trunk is powered by a 1.2 GHz Snapdragon 410 Quad-Core Processor based on Cortex A53 and has Adreno 306 GPU. The performance of the phone is fast and lag free. Gaming experience on the phone is also good and the 2GB of RAM does allow you to perform multitasking without any issues. The phone did not heat up much during our testing period. However we felt that the touch quality of the phone is not fluid enough and hence lacks to offer a smooth navigation.
Check out some synthetic benchmark scores.
It scored 21545 points in the AnTuTu benchmark.
It scored 490 points in GeekBench Single-Core benchmark
It scored 1522 in GeekBench Multi-Core Benchmark.
It managed to score 5279 points in the 3D Mark Ice Storm Benchmark.
Battery Life
The phone’s 2,100 mAh battery offers a good battery life. On a single charge, the battery lasted for one and half days on medium to high use.
Conclusion
The Elephone Trunk falls in the range of a budget devices that are flooding the Indian markets currently. The 2GB RAM and a quad-core 64-bit processor does offer you a decent performance when it comes to gaming and multi tasking. However, the 8MP camera is not the best and takes average photos. The phone does offer 4G LTE support, but we will have to wait and see what bands it will support when it will come to India. It does have a good display, but we thought the touch quality could have been better.
Pros
- Good display
- Smooth performance
- Decent Battery life
- 4G LTE support
Cons
- Average Camera
- Average Touch quality
- Poor Call Quality