Elephone, a China based company, has garnered much limelight in the past owing to its feature rich smartphones. The Mobile Indian recently got one of its devices, the Elephone M2, for review. Here is an in-depth review of the Elephone M2 which we used for more than a month.
Note that the Elephone M2 is not available in India but you can import it. At the time of writing it was available for $179 (Rs 11,808) though its original price tag was of $199 or Rs 13,128 approximately.
The Elephone M2 comes in grey, white and golden colour. The golden model, which we got for review looks quite good. The highlight of its design is its metal unibody which is not common in the affordable segment. The back panel of the phone has two black colour areas (one at the bottom and the top) that perfectly contrast the other parts of the phone.
Despite having a metal body, the M2 is quite light and is sturdy as well. It felt quite comfortable in palms but it might get a bit slippery during summer when we usually have sweaty palms.
In M2, the power button and the volume controllers are on the left hand side panel while in the right panel lies a hybrid SIM slot that can hold two SIM cards or a micro SD card and a SIM card.
Below its screen lies a physical home button which also acts as a fingerprint sensor. Above the display lies a tiny speaker grill, the front camera, Proximity Sensor and an indicator light.
The Elephone M2 is quite a compact smartphone for a device with 5.5 inch display. The screen has full HD (1920×1080 pixels) resolution, thus offering a decent gaming and video experience. The screen has decent touch response and okay brightness. The most annoying fact about its display is that when I decreased its brightness to minimum using the slider of the notification panel, its display went totally dark, rendering the device totally useless. Its only after a lot of hectic effort that I could restore its brightness to normal.
It could be a fault with the UI as well. Note that the phone has the Android 5.1 operating system and offers the default Android UI. It is powered by the Mediatek MT6753 octa core processor, Mali T720 graphics processor and 3 GB RAM. Thanks to the combination the phone managed to run graphics laden games like ‘Injustice Gods Among Us’. But the phone was not properly optimised and hence despite having such high end hardware, it used to hand while multitasking and playing the high end games.
The Elephone M2 also offers plenty of storage space – 32 GB internal and a micro SD card slot that can hold a 128 GB micro SD card. However, since its hybrid SIM slot, there is a place for two SIM or just one SIM and a micro SD card. The phone doesn’t have USB OTG functionality either.
The M2 has a 13 Megapixel auto focus rear camera along with a flash light while for selfies it has got a 5 megapixel front camera. Both the cameras offer appreciable output, especially in low light. Though there were some issue with focussing and the rear camera tend to over saturate colours a bit.
Here are some samples of the rear camera.
And this is captured through its front camera.
As I said earlier, the Elephone M2 offers dual SIM slot. You can access 3G/4G using your SIM card. There wasn’t any issue with network. GPS, Bluetooth and WiFi also worked quite fine. However, it battery output was less than satisfactory. Its 2600 mAh battery never lasted more than 12 hours on medium usage even with one SIM, forcing me to charge it atleast twice a day.