We go hands-on with the Elephone P8000!

Aside from the P9000, Elephone also brought over another smartphone from their homeland to the PH. It’s the P8000, a supposedly mid-range offering that is trying to win over customers with a larger than usual battery and its own brand of bling. If that last part confused you, just give us a minute to explain. But first, the specs:

Elephone P8000 specs

• 1.3GHz MediaTek MT6753 octa-core processor
• 3GB of RAM
• 5.5-inch full HD display, 1920 x 1080 resolution
• 16GB of internal storage, expandable via microSD up to 128GB
• 13-megapixel camera with Samsung sensor, LED flash
• 5-megapixel front camera
• Dual SIM
• 3G, LTE
• WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS, A-GPS, Fingerprint scanner
• Android 6.0 Marshmallow
• 4165mAh battery

Initial impressions: metal body, big battery and a lot of bling

Elephone knows just how competitive the mid-range market is in the PH, so they’re throwing in a couple of nice features in their new P8000 smartphone to entice customers. For one thing, the phone’s frame is made from metal, increasing the device’s durability compared to one made out of plastic.

Elephone’s also tried to bump up the bling with the P8000 by adding an ostentatious gold color a unique textile pattern on the back. The gold coloring of the pattern makes the back of the phone a little too ostentatious for our taste, and is begging to be paired with an Ed Hardy ensemble. Just like with anything design-related, your mileage may vary.

Once you pick up the phone, you’ll see just how hefty it is. Much of that weight is because of the large 4165mAh battery inside it. And like its more expensive brother, the P9000, it has a fingerprint scanner at the back, located below the 13-megapixel rear camera.

The volume rocker and power button is located on the right side of the phone, while the 3.5mm jack is on the top. The USB port is on the bottom of the device. The dual SIM slots and micro SIM port are on the back, underneath the removable plastic back.

While the P8000 does have a fingerprint scanner, there’s a few things that we noticed with it that felt out of place. For one thing, it’s not that accurate, and our first few tries to unlock the phone with our finger didn’t do a thing. We enrolled our finger again (keeping the previous instance) and that did the trick.

Another thing that we noticed was that the fingerprint scanner did not wake up the phone from a sleep state. To unlock the phone, you’ll first have to turn on the display then unlock it, which is weird since it takes it a little longer to unlock than other phones in the market that has a fingerprint scanner.

Despite its ostentatious looks, budget hardware makes the P8000 run. The phone is equipped with a MediaTek MT6753 octa-core processor alongside 3GB of RAM and 16GB of expandable storage. Everybody has a good grasp of what the MT6753 processor can do in both benchmarks and real-world performance so we’re not going to bore you with specifics, suffice to say that it’s capable of handling most apps without any issues, though more demanding games may take a bigger toll on the device.

That’s pretty much it for our hands-on. The Elephone P8000 is available to buy in Lazada today, at 12 noon for Php 7,799 if you’re looking to get it without waiting for our full review.