We are obsessed with all things Android: phones, tablets, apps and hacks to get the best out of Google's OS.
Some words on the Doogee X5 Max
So, as I promised, here's the thread on the Doogee X5 Max. Disclaimer: I won it in a raffle, which means that I did pay only 1 euro for it (the price of the raffle). It's a smartphone from the Chinese brand Doogee, whose main focus are the low and medium end of the market. In this case the Doogee X5 Max is clearly focused in the low end with a market price of $60, but it has some features to make it worth your while. Let me list the specs real quick:
- Mediatek MT6580 SoC, with quad core Cortex A7 CPU and Mali 400 GPU
- 1 GB RAM, 8 GB storage (5.5 GB available to the user, microSD card slot)
- Dual SIM (microSIM, nanoSIM), no LTE
- 5 inch screen with HD resolution
- 5 MP back camera, front camera with VGA resolution
- Fingerprint sensor
- 4000 mAh battery
- Android 6.0
The SoC is absolutely bottom of the barrel, and it would be underpowered in 2012. That these sorts of chipsets are running Marshmallow while the flagships of that year (with SoCs which are way more powerful than the MT6580) are not updated says a lot of the dire need we have for a more open approach towards component drivers in mobile phones. However, stuff like the fingerprint sensor, the über large battery, the recent Android version and the promising screen run counter to expectations considering the $60 bucks this stuff costs.
With the specs out of the way, I want to focus on the external aspect with the phone turned off,, and commend Doogee for their good job. It's a chunky phone (1 cm thick), it has to be with that big battery, but that heft is not useless. The phone feels secure in the hand, the plastic feels good at the touch and there's no creaking, rattling or bending. The hardware buttons (a power button and a volume rocker) are also very well constructed and they feel good when you press them, not stiff and not feeble, but just right. The back cover, which you need to open in order to access the battery and the SIM/microSD slots does also snap out well, and snap in perfectly. This is testament that you don't need to make unibody designs if you want a durable piece of kit.
Frankly this phone, on the outside, doesn't feel like its price range at all... except for a "little detail". The front glass panel is quite reflective with the phone turned off (enough to be a makeshift mirror if you need one), and it has no oleophobic coating of any kind, which means that the moment you put a finger on it the smudges will never ever vanish.
Once you turn it on, you see that screen lighting up and... well, it's actually quite good! The brightness levels are pretty high and the phone should be pretty serviceable outdoors as long as it's not put under the sunlight directly. The capacitive buttons below the screen (standard Chinese configuration: Menu/Home/Back) are not self-lit, which is a cost-cutting measure and something I prefer. Something weird that I found was that actually the left-most key works indeed as the Menu key. Considering that Android deprecated the Menu button with Android 4.0 ICS, almost five years ago, it's weird to see it in action again (it works in the Holo apps, usually activating the three dot menu they tend to have).
You start using it and what you have is the bog standard Android experience with some skeuomorphic icons. Doogee has not put many apps in the system partition, and the ones that exist are arguably usable, except for maybe the DG Xender apps which seems to be a Doogee-specific data transfer app. There's also DocumentsToGo (an office suite), the fingerprint manager and a thing called Parallel SPace which allows you to use two profiles for apps that usually only allow one (Facebook, Whatsapp, Telegram, etc.). The movement along the menus and apps is zippy, which is again surprising.
The battery life is fitting for the monster inside it, with a guaranteed couple of days if you use the phone heavily, which get extended if you use it less. Obviously if you keep it hooked to Bluetooth every single day downloading stuff with your 3G connection it'll suffer, but for less taxing use cases it should do three or four days.
You read this and you think: this guy looks like a salesman, everything seems to be good, or good for the price. Where are the compromises? They are everywhere else, basically. No LTE makes browsing less fun because internet is rather slow; the scarce RAM meshes poorly with the growing requirements of messenger programs which now run bots, attach every file under the sun and put filters in photos; the fingerprint sensor is temperamental and unreliable, and it takes a while until you learn to position your finger so it will get detected; the back camera is crappy, as it can barely focus, the color processing makes things appear cartoony and details are very poorly resolved. It'll do in a pinch, but it's really hard to take a good picture with it. The performance is nothing to write home about, although messengers, documents, browsers and very old games work mostly flawlessly.
Would I recommend this phone? It's a complicated question. I'm happy with it and I've found a use case which fits it pretty well thanks to an iPega gamepad I have (iPega PG-9025). Using the phone as an emulator for PSX and older consoles is a great option because the task does not tax the SoC excessively, the screen is decent and the battery allows me to play for hours and hours. However, I wouldn't have bought it at full price for that purpose, and I surely wouldn't use it as my main phone. This is more fitting as a decoy phone or for a young kid's first. Corner cases like mine for you can make use of a cheap, yet long-lasting piece of hardware seem very attractive for the Doogee X5 Max.




Thanks a lot for the review.