[cross posted from freaktab]
So I received my P98 3G with an Octa Core MTK8392 a few days ago.
(ordered from aliexpress.com)
For the price ($240) I'm more than happy.
It's good looking (looks like an iPad from the front, the champagne back shows this is something else...), nice Retina screen, has a built in cellular radio so that I can connect to my 3G provider here in Norway.
But as always there are a few things I've found that I don't like...
Most of them will probably be fixed as soon as I'm able to root the P98, but so far I haven't found neither a verified rooting procedure or any ROMs although ROMs for other MTK8392's might work (but not so sure I want to be the first to try...)
First and foremost, the OS has the storage partitioned into a relatively small System partition of just 890MB where I have already hit the limit. The 'internal storage', or sdcard0, is 11.43GB total.
I have installed a 32GB micro SD, but so far I haven't been able to use it - at least not for 'native' app data. I can of course manually copy movies, TV series and stuff to have on the micro SD, but for instance my music streaming app, called Wimp (a Spotify alternative), for some reason doesn't allow me to store offline music on the micro SD (as it does for instance on my Sony Z1 Compact phone).
Speaking of my Z1c phone, it has just one large 'in device' partition of 11.8GB plus an external micro SD card, so there's hardly any limits on how many apps I want to install.
I have on the P98 moved all the apps that are possible to move to the 'internal storage', but still I've reached the storage limit on the System partition so I need to start uninstalling apps in order to add new ones.
It also comes with surprisingly much bloatware, and they are all in Chinese so I have no idea what they are. One I do recognize is Baidu, which takes over all my searches unless I open the browser, go to www.google.com and perform a search there. If I search via the Google search bar on my desktop or by entering a search string in the browser address field, Baidu takes over.
I also get a lot of notifications in Chinese from different apps (I assume).
What else...
A slight movement can be felt on the lower left frame when pressing, probably too little glue there when they assembled it. No big deal, hardly noticable.
No automatic brightness adjustment was a bit disappointing, but again no biggie.
AnTuTu 5 gives me 30.122, I think it dropped just a tad after I switched from Dalvik to ART (yes, all Developer options are available).
If you have any comments or questions please let me know!
EDIT: two more things: Chrome (and Chrome Beta) crashes. That I was aware of before I bought this, but still hoping to see Google fix this. But a bit of a bigger problem, my Google/Gmail contacts are nowhere to be seen... I've checked that Contacts are supposed to be synced, but nothing (noone) appears. Will try to delete and reenable my Google account to see if that helps.
Regards,
Christopher
Oslo, Norway
So I received my P98 3G with an Octa Core MTK8392 a few days ago.
(ordered from aliexpress.com)
For the price ($240) I'm more than happy.
It's good looking (looks like an iPad from the front, the champagne back shows this is something else...), nice Retina screen, has a built in cellular radio so that I can connect to my 3G provider here in Norway.
But as always there are a few things I've found that I don't like...
Most of them will probably be fixed as soon as I'm able to root the P98, but so far I haven't found neither a verified rooting procedure or any ROMs although ROMs for other MTK8392's might work (but not so sure I want to be the first to try...)
First and foremost, the OS has the storage partitioned into a relatively small System partition of just 890MB where I have already hit the limit. The 'internal storage', or sdcard0, is 11.43GB total.
I have installed a 32GB micro SD, but so far I haven't been able to use it - at least not for 'native' app data. I can of course manually copy movies, TV series and stuff to have on the micro SD, but for instance my music streaming app, called Wimp (a Spotify alternative), for some reason doesn't allow me to store offline music on the micro SD (as it does for instance on my Sony Z1 Compact phone).
Speaking of my Z1c phone, it has just one large 'in device' partition of 11.8GB plus an external micro SD card, so there's hardly any limits on how many apps I want to install.
I have on the P98 moved all the apps that are possible to move to the 'internal storage', but still I've reached the storage limit on the System partition so I need to start uninstalling apps in order to add new ones.
It also comes with surprisingly much bloatware, and they are all in Chinese so I have no idea what they are. One I do recognize is Baidu, which takes over all my searches unless I open the browser, go to www.google.com and perform a search there. If I search via the Google search bar on my desktop or by entering a search string in the browser address field, Baidu takes over.
I also get a lot of notifications in Chinese from different apps (I assume).
What else...
A slight movement can be felt on the lower left frame when pressing, probably too little glue there when they assembled it. No big deal, hardly noticable.
No automatic brightness adjustment was a bit disappointing, but again no biggie.
AnTuTu 5 gives me 30.122, I think it dropped just a tad after I switched from Dalvik to ART (yes, all Developer options are available).
If you have any comments or questions please let me know!
EDIT: two more things: Chrome (and Chrome Beta) crashes. That I was aware of before I bought this, but still hoping to see Google fix this. But a bit of a bigger problem, my Google/Gmail contacts are nowhere to be seen... I've checked that Contacts are supposed to be synced, but nothing (noone) appears. Will try to delete and reenable my Google account to see if that helps.
Regards,
Christopher
Oslo, Norway
