Elephone Trunk review
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Elephone Trunk review with latest ROM
Elephone Trunk review
I have had the Elephone trunk for a couple of weeks now and whilst I wanted to jump straight in to a review after a couple of days, there were a few glaring problems that needed fixing.
The Elephone Trunk is a budget phone costing just $120 (£79), so what does that $120 get you?
Screen
The Elephone Trunk features a 5″ 720p OGS display, unlike the vast majority of Elephone’s handsets which measure in at 5.5″ also unlike some of Elephones previous panels, for some this screen size will be a real blessing but for others it will be just a bit too small, the Trunk display is really bright and gives vivid colours.
As for detail as the phones screen is just 5″ the 720p looks pleasing to the eye, not loosing too much detail and coming in around 250ppi, the lower resolution of the screen also helps to keep the GPU load lower resulting in better performance.
Processor and GPU
Again unlike the other handsets so far released by Elephone, the Trunk does not come with a Mediatek CPU, this time they have chosen to include a Qualcomm MSM8916 Snapdragon 410 quad core cpu clocked at 1.2GHz and Adreno 306 GPU
The phone performs well in everyday usage, the Snapdragon 410 and Adreno 360 handling menus and most apps with decent speed and fluidity, gaming is surprisingly not bad considering the phones limitations.
Storage RAM/ROM
The Elephone Trunk comes with 2 gb of Ram and 16GB Rom, storage is upgradable via micro SD card
Battery
The Elephone Trunk comes with a 2100mAh battery, whilst I would have preferred more, I think the lower power usage of both the 720p screen and the Snapdragon 410 help to keep battery usage down and it is possible to eek out a day of usage between charges, as long as you do not push the phone to hard with constant gaming or video playback.
Antutu Benchmarks*
1st Run – 22848
2nd Run – 22624
3rd Run – 21890
Average – 22,454
Check out the video below to see the Antutu benchmarks being run (the video has been speed up to make viewing easier)
Gaming performance**
The Elephone Trunk is not really a phone that you would buy specifically for gaming, however as can be seen from the video bellow showing it running Asphalt 8, it is more than capable of shifting enough polygons to make gameplay enjoyable.
Yes there is the odd frame skip and its not as smooth as you would see on more powerful handsets, but the underdog has some bite and would keep you or the kids amused on a long car or train journey.
Cameras
The Elephone trunk comes with an 8mp rear facing camera which is boosted to 13mp through interpolation, with a single LED flash, upfront you will find a 2mp selfie camera.
When the Elephone Trunk arrived the camera performance was to say the least not very good, the sensor was unable to achieve a decent focus even in good lighting.
The camera continually hunted for a lock, often achieving a clear picture and then un-focusing and taking a blurred image with perhaps a 1 in 10 chance of achieving a half decent picture.
I spoke with a contact at Elephone who advised that an updated firmware was being worked on and that the camera issue should be greatly improved once the firmware was released.
The firmware came out last week via OTA and I quickly installed it to see if I would finally be able to make use of the Trunks camera, thankfully the OTA update has gone some way towards resolving the issue and I can now pick a focus point on the screen and the camera will lock too it and take the picture.
Is the camera perfect now? not really it still needs some tweaking in my opinion, low light imaging is not great and colour balance could be better, all things that hopefully will improve given time and development.
Firmware development
Speaking of development, as mentioned earlier the Elephone Trunk includes the Qualcomm MSM8916 Snapdragon 410 quad core cpu, unlike Mediatek CPU’s the developer comunity for Qualcomm chipsets is a lot bigger (mainly due to Mediatek’s choice of not releasing required developer files as open source), thankfully the Trunk handset benefits from this active developer community, there are a couple of teams on forums such as XDA and the Russian site4pda.ru working on custom roms for the Trunk (or as the variant the Russians are working on of the phone is known as the Arc Benefit A3), what this means for users of the Trunk is that custom roms such as CyanogenMOD 12.1 are now running well on our $120 handsets, there is even a version of CyanogenMod 13 based on Android Marshmallow being tested via XDA at the moment.
Design
Design wise, I really like what Elephone have done with the phone, it feels really comfortable to hold and the 5″ screen puts everything within easy thumb reach.
The front of the phone is mostly filled by the 5″ OGS panel (the black boarders of which are approximately 2.5mm wide and do not detract from the viewing experience), on the bottom chin there are three capacitive buttons, the centre of which is the circular home button, unfortunately Elephone have not as yet implemented a way to use this for notification, but hopefully they or one of the other devs will have this working sooner rather than later.
On the top chin you can find the speaker, proximity sensor and front facing 2mp selfie camera, the rear shell of the Elephone Trunk is coated in a nice tactile black rubber, that reminds me of earlier Apple Macbooks before they went to unibody construction.
The coating provides nice levels of grip in the hand and works really well with the curved edges of the phone, leaving you confident whilst using the handset.
The rear cover is also home to the Elephone logo and 8mp rear camera and single LED flash, towards the bottom you will find two slots, these are for the built in speaker and provide decent audio output levels.
On the right hand side of the phone you will find the power button and also the volume rocker, these are finished in chromed plastic and feel fairly good in operation.
The right side of the phone has no buttons.
The top edge of the phone has a standard micro usb input as well as 3.5mm headphone jack
Connectivity
The Elephone Trunk comes Bluetooth 4.0 and Dual sim support compatible with the following networks
2G: GSM 850/900/1800/1900MHz
3G: WCDMA 850/900/2100MHz
4G: FDD-LTE 800/1800/2100/2600MHz
2G: GSM 850/900/1800/1900MHz
3G: WCDMA 850/900/2100MHz
4G: FDD-LTE 800/1800/2100/2600MHz
Battery
The Elephone Trunk comes with a removable 2100mAh Li-polymer battery, whilst not the biggest battery it is enough for a day of normal usage.
The fact that it is only powering a 5″ 720p screen and lower end CPU really helps to get the most from the battery, however if you do intend to do a lot of gaming and intensive stuff on the Trunk you may wish to purchase a back-up battery to keep just in case you need it.
Final thoughts
The Elephone Trunk is an interesting little phone, it provides real world performance that is ‘good enough’ for most users needs and fits well in the pocket.
It looks nice and has the appearance of a handset costing much more than its small $120 price tag would suggest, but the niggles with the camera are preventing the phone from scoring as highly as I had hopped it would.
What it does have going for it is great third party support, just head over to the forums linked above and you will see what I mean.
I hope that the ongoing support for this little phone will continue and that they will iron out the bugs, it really deserves to be supported.
Would I but one for a family member? or myself for that matter? do you know what, I probably would, for me it allows my inner geek to tweak and flash lots of new roms, whilst for my family especially my children it offers a good set of functions and quality at a price that will not break the bank.
Please feel free to leave comments and questions below
kind regards Shanos
The Elephone Trunk can be purchased here
*Antutu Benchmarks are provided to give a comparative view of handsets performance.
Whilst they do give an indication of a handsets overall potential. they do not fully take in to account hardware and software optimisation.
Manufacturers have also been known to include cheat software built in to handsets, to deliberately make handsets operate faster in tests than they might otherwise in real world usage.
Antutu benchmarks on gadgetz.tv are run 3 times in close succession to see if any throttling occurs due to heavy CPU/GPU usage.
**Gaming videos are recorded using AZ Screen Recorder
Elephone Trunk
PROS
- - 5" screen
- - Good price
- - 3rd Party Rom Support
- - Bright clear screen
CONS
- - Poor camera
- - Small battery
- - 5" screen
- VIA
- SHANOS
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