The Elephone P7000 Pioneer turned a lot of heads a short while ago when it promised to offer so many different features for an extraordinarily low price. This included everything from a full-HD display through to a fingerprint scanner, as well as supporting a number of different ROMs and having support for things like 3 GB of RAM. I"ve managed to get my hands on one to review, but while you wait on that, check out my unboxing and first impressions of the device below. It"s worth mentioning that there are three color variations of the phone, and I received the gold toned one (which has a gold toned bezel, housing and case). It also comes in grey and white.
The Good
The amount of accessories it comes with is absolutely wonderful. It included two normal screen protectors, a tempered glass screen protector (with a hardness of Mohs 9H) that filters blue light, and a sense case that automatically unlocks the phone when it is opened, locks the phone when it is closed, and displays an analog clock or a call notification through a circular window. This is next to the standard data cable and wall charger. In total this is about an extra $30 worth of free stuff (>$50 if it was a Western product) so it"s extremely welcomed -- clearly Elephone is trying very hard to impress with this device.
The phone itself seems to have a pretty good camera so far and the fingerprint scanner is extremely responsive. The speakers seem to be fairly loud and the overall build quality appears to be very well done. The home button (which doubles as a notification light, much like the Elephone P6000) can be customized significantly with which colors it displays for which type of notification.
It comes with a practically bare-bones version of Android Lollipop, much like the Elephone P6000.
The Bad
I went looking for different ROMs to flash but the only one I could find was CyanogenMod 12.1 which appears to still be in beta. I"m one of the first to receive the phone (I"m not even sure if the pre-orders have gone out yet) so it might just be that it"s still early, but I"m hoping that all or at least most of the ROMs that have been promised will come out soon.
It has significantly thicker bezels than was expected; it appears to have been photoshopped out in the promotional photos.
Things are looking pretty good for Elephone this year -- the P8000 should be coming out soon and they"ve just started pre-orders for the S2 and S2 Plus smartphones today, so it seems they"re trying to really push their name out and enter the market in full force. Hopefully the phones live up to the hype! The full review of the P7000 will be up in a week or so. Please post in the comments if there is anything specific you would like me to cover.