Today we will bring you the full review of the Elephone S7 3GB/32GB Helio X20 variant. We acquired our unit from Gearbest and it is currently selling for $179.99 in flash sale now.
Included, as standard accessories are:
1)Sim Eject Pin
2)Quickstart User Manual
3)Elephone branded screen protector (there is a factory screen protector pre-installed already)
4)Official TPU Crystal Case
5)Elephone Branded 5V 2A Charger
6)White MicroUSB Cable
Related: How to Hide Home Button and Make Screenshot on Elephone S7
We are quite pleased that Elephone has gone the route of including all required accessories right out of the box. It is not often to have all the accessories you could possibly need included, as most manufacturers try to make more money from you by only including the most basic of accessories, such as a charger, usb cable and sim eject pin.
Overall Specs
As I briefly mentioned above, the phone itself has 3GB of Ram and 32gb of storage which can be expanded upto 128gb using a MicroSD card. It is driven by Mediatek newest line of Helio deca-core processors the X20, running at 2.0ghz and contains a non-removable 3000mAh Battery. It has a nice premium feel with a total weight of 175 grams. It has quick charging which charger upto 50% battery capacity within the first 30minutes and 90% charge after 60 minutes. You can see that it has nice blue metallic shine finish, the phone has a fully laminated bezel-less 5.5 Inch Full HD display and a 5 MP front facing camera. Both, we believe, are protected by a piece of curved gorilla glass 3. On the bottom we have the clickable home button which also has a built in finger print scanner. On the back we have a 13mp rear facing omnivision camera sensor with a large F2.2 aperture which has electronic image stabilization. Next to it we have a single LED flash. The midframe is completely metal and you can see the power and volume rockers on the side. On the top is the standard 3.5mm headphone jack and on the bottom is the microUSB plug and speakers. On the other side is the simcard slot which supports either a single Nano Sim and MicroSD card or two Nano Sim cards. The phone itself runs elephone’s own launcher based on Android 6.0 Marshmallow. It has Google Play preinstalled on it as well as some very basic apps.
In terms of the non-removable 3000mah battery, it performed basically as predicted with approximately 5 ½ hours of battery life on medium to heavy usage. This smaller battery capacity is helped out by the fact that the phone supports quick charge technology. While it isn’t specifically stated, we can only assume that it utilizes Mediatek’s Pump Express charging technology. We were able to get a full charge of the battery within an impressive 1 ½ hours only. So while the Elephone S7 has a smaller battery than some other phones in the same mid to high range market, it makes up for this small deficiency with quick charging.
As for the front of the screen, I absolutely love the curved 2D Full HD display which offers great viewing angles and crystal sharp images / colors. Elephone has definitely learnt from their previous mistakes as well, as we are quite happy to mention that the phone doesn’t suffer from ghost swiping due to the curved display, as we painfully experienced when testing the Elephone S3, last year. My only dismay with the body of the phone is that the slick glossy finish, on the front and back, is an absolute fingerprint magnet. However I don’t mind it that much because the phone still looks amazing even when covered in fingerprints.
Nestled at the bottom-center of the screen is the touch sensitive home button which doubles as the fingerprint sensor. This button is very impressive as it replaces the menu and back buttons that I am used to with android. With this home button a light touch replaces “back”, double light touch or full button press replaces “home”, double full button press is a programmable “shortcut” key and holding down on the home button brings up the “Recent Tasks”. So as you can see this home button is extremely versatile and it does take a little time to get used to, especially if you’ve been a longtime android user. HOWEVER if you do not want to be bound by the single home button, inside the settings you can activate the software equivalent of the three button android home bar.
The display is also very responsive when it comes to the touch capabilities which are helped out by Mediatek’s powerful deca-core Helio X20 processor. When we unboxed the device and ran our preliminary out of box Antutu Benchmark we got a score of 85315, now with a wide variety of apps installed on it, the same Antutu Benchmark gives us a score of 82337. It is nice to see that there wasn’t a large drop in performance after installing a large number of apps, some of which are constantly running in the background. When running resource heavy test apps such as Asphalt Off-Road the phone experiences an overall CPU load of between 60-70%. So there is still plenty of processing power remaining that you can be confident enough to run other various processes in the background without any fear of performance issues. Lastly the biggest surprise that we didn’t expect was the quality of pictures the onboard backfacing omnivision 13mp sensor, as you can see from the attached picture it was able to take extremely sharp and clear pictures while exhibiting good depth of colors. The only small criticism we would say regarding the camera is the 1-2 second lag when taking pictures, due to lack of PDAF. Otherwise we thoroughly enjoyed snapping photos with the Elephone S7.
Overall the Elephone S7 is a beautiful well-crafted and powerful phone within its peer-class. It offers an extremely sharp and vibrant screen with appealing curved glass edge. It has a smaller battery than most phones but the quick charging ability offsets the faster battery drain rate. The included Mediatek Helio X20 deca-core processor offers a lot of computing power which helps the phone run smoothly with resource rich content while still leaving enough excess computing headroom for anything else you might want to run in the background. The camera is well balanced and able to take some really nice and sharp photos. Lastly we are quite please to also see that Elephone is still pushing out updates and supporting this phone, which is uncommon for most Chinese phone manufacturers. Right now it is in flash sale at $179.99 for Elephone S7 3GB 32GB version. Thank Gearbest to send us this good product for review.