ELEPHONE S8 REVIEW BLOCK

ELEPHONE S8-Elephone S8 Review: Blending Low Cost With Great Design

It really can’t be stressed enough how good the screen is, especially at the cost Elephone is charging. 

ELEPHONE is a company that like many other Chinese brands out there will be mostly unknown to a majority of consumers who live outside of China, but it’s also a company that is rapidly cranking out smartphones with some of the newest technology and design features, and the S8, one of its upcoming phones, is a good display of that drive to produce a good device for consumers that further shortens the gap between low-cost phones and high-cost ones in terms of good hardware, features, and design. Elephone isn’t the first company to strive to offer consumers a great phone with top-notch features for much less than top-tier OEMs and flagships, and the S8 is certainly not the first phone on the market (once it launches) to offer some of the more interesting design elements. It is, however, a phone that does those things and it’s because of that we were eager to check it out. We’ve been spending some time with the S8 that is bound for the market in the near future to see how it stacks up. Let’s take a closer look at the Elephone S8 and see what it has to offer.

The ELEPHONE S8 is a budget device, and because of this you won’t see things like Qualcomm’s top-tier processors or Samsung’s best display panels inside of it, but it does still come with some pretty good hardware by comparison. The Elephone S8 is running with a MediaTek Helio X25 Deca-Core processor, paired with 4GB of RAM and 64GB of internal storage. The RAM and storage are by no means pushing the envelope in terms of cutting-edge specs, but they’re plenty enough for a device of this caliber. It’s the X25 CPU that makes this device a little more interesting as it’s MediaTek’s most powerful so far. Beyond the CPU, RAM, and storage, the S8 is equipped with a 6-inch display with a resolution of 2560 x 1440. This might not be a Super AMOLED panel, but after just a little less than a week of using it, it’s clear that this is a really nice display, but we’ll get into that more a little bit later.

For the cameras, the S8 isn’t slacking, as it comes with a 21-megapixel sensor on the back with autofocus and LED flash, and on the front, it’s using an 8-megapixel sensor for selfies and video chat. For sensors, it has a fingerprint sensor that can be used for unlocking the device, but it doesn’t have NFC so it can’t be used for mobile payments. It’s also got a proximity sensor, ambient light sensor, gyroscope, gravity sensor, and hall sensor, and supports Bluetooth 4.0 and Wi-Fi 802.11ac for connectivity. It has a 4,000mAh non-removable battery, and it runs on Android 7.1 Nougat for the software. Lastly, it’s using USB Type-C for the charging and data transfer port, and this is the only port on the device as there’s no port for plugging in 3.5mm headphones.

If you’re familiar with Chinese phone brands, or if you’ve read a number of our reviews for some of the devices coming from these brands, then you may already know that there tend to be extras in the box. With the Elephone S8, there are some extras as well. You’ll find the phone, as well as a clear silicone case for protecting the device, as well as the USB Type-C charging cable and wall adapter, a SIM card ejector tool, and a USB Type-C-to-3.5mm audio adapter. So, while you don’t have a 3.5mm audio port on the device for plugging in headphones and Elephone doesn’t package in a pair of USB Type-C earbuds, you do have the adapter so you can at least plug in a pair of standard 3.5mm earbuds you may already have.

The design is one of the more noticeable and standout parts of the S8, though it’s clear that there is some inspiration here from other devices. That said, it’s not so much that borders on being nearly identical to those devices in terms of design. We’re, of course, talking about the display mostly, which features a nearly bezel-free screen on the top and sides, with a little bit of a bezel on the bottom to make room for the fingerprint sensor/home button, and the front-facing camera. Elephone isn’t the only company to incorporate this design after Xiaomi introduced the world to the original Mi MIX, and it won’t be the last, and while the S8 does not look as sleek as the Mi MIX due to the larger bottom bezel, it still looks pretty nice thanks to the big screen and the screen’s resolution. Elephone has also used a combination of a metal frame and a glass back, which makes it look somewhat premium and comfortable to hold thanks to the glass backing which doesn’t get too warm when holding it after long periods of heavy use. The use of glass is also nice because it shouldn’t scratch as easily as if Elephone had chosen to use metal all the way around, or at least it wouldn’t be as noticeable.

As mentioned above, the Elephone S8 features an almost bezel-free design for the display, and on the front, you’ll find the camera in the bottom bezel, in the right-hand corner alongside the fingerprint sensor and home button. On the bottom of the phone, you have the USB Type-C charging port, along with a single speaker that uses an NXP audio amplifier to boost the sound for things like music, movies, and more. On the right side of the frame you have the power button and volume up and down buttons, while the left side of the frame houses the SIM card tray, and then on the back in the top center you have the rear-facing camera and LED flash module, and a mostly clean back with nothing but an Elephone logo at the bottom.

With a Helio X25 deca-core CPU and 4GB of RAM I expected the S8 to handle its own when it came to simple tasks, and it certainly had no problem. The real test though was seeing if it was able to handle multitasking with running multiple apps continuously and being able to play mobile games that were demanding due to graphics. Sure enough, the device did fairly well on all fronts and didn’t have any issues when using it how I normally use my everyday device. While there might be some high-end games that it has a little more trouble with running smoothly, this isn’t an issue I came up against as playing games like Never Gone, Need For Speed No Limits, and the newly released Terra Battle 2, the S8 was able to play all of those games with ease and not stutter or lag. While mobile gaming isn’t going to be the most important factor for all users, it does do a good job at showing how well the device is able to handle high-stress situations in terms of computing, as high-end 3D games are fairly demanding on the CPU and GPU. I had no issues with playing games or using multiple apps at once during my time with this phablet, and I’m a fairly heavy user of my mobile devices so I was hoping that this would have no issues with handling my everyday usage. I wasn’t disappointed. Overall, the handset is more than capable of handling any task that the average user should be able to throw at it, and heavy users should have no trouble with getting done anything that they would need their device for while using it.

While benchmarks aren’t the end-all answer for how a device is going to perform, they do provide a base for what to expect. To gauge how the device might perform in real-world situations, we ran the Elephone S8 through a few different benchmarks, including AnTuTu, Geekbench 4, and 3DMark for graphics testing. If you’re interested in seeing how the phone performed during those benchmark tests, you can view the screenshots of the scores in the gallery below.

Phone Calls & Network

ELEPHONE S8 is an unlocked GSM device, but it is not designed for use in the U.S. market, which means it will have limited use here. That said, it should still be usable with 3G networks, even though the U.S. LTE network frequencies aren’t supported. You can view the supported networks for the S8 below.
2G: 850/900/1800/1900
3G: 900/2100
4G LTE: 800/1800/2100/FDD 2600/TDD 2600/ TDD 2300

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