So here are my thoughts after using the Chinese V2 for a few days, and after a brief test of all my apps.
For perspective, I came from a Huawei 20x. (original, not the 5g)
tl;dr: I quite like it.
The things I like:
Folded It just feels and acts like a normal 6.4 phone. It's not annoying in any way in terms of thickness/weight/shape/aspect ratio/anything. And that's what I want. A "normal" phone when I just want to do a quick normal thing.
The hinge is fine for the most part. It feels strong and smooth.
Thoughts on the internal screen:
1) The squarish aspect ratio means it's very natural to side by side two apps, which is very useful.
2) The ability to easily change from half/half to 2/3-1/3 is very useful. It's easy to temporarily prioritize one over the other. Also you have more options to make an app wider but not so wide it makes the app annoying. (more on that later).
3) Nice to have a massive keyboard and still see your app, when you need it.
4) If the app isn't specifically optimized (and arguably, only intended) for a 20:9 aspect ratio, then showing it on a bigger screen is glorious. You just get way more image. So things like maps, docs, spreadsheets, powerpoints, browsers, etc. Also videos that are 'less wide' (especially 4:3!) are bigger and better on the inside.
Things I don't like:
1) For apps that ARE specifically optimized for 20:9, (usually games), The square aspect ratio can be a mess when you full screen. This should not be a surprise.
You basically have that 'widescreen -> pan and scan" thing movies did before.
The UI will (usually) adjust but the "field of view" tends to be chopped.
Vampire survivors is a good example of this - play it on half the inside screen and it's like normal. Use both sides of the screen, and all the items/characters are ~ twice as big, and you lose roughly half of your vertical field of view.
(Note although this is something I don't like, it's actually a point in FAVOR of the V2, because no matter what, i have that outside screen where everything works well).
2) You can't really horizontally multitask except for a handful of apps.
If your app basically requires landscape mode (i.e. a video player, or roblox (yes, I know)) then you don't even have the option of playing it on half the screen. It gets chopped WAY too much (EDIT: too much on the inside screen)
I would consider this less of a big deal, because in reality there aren't -that- many apps that force landscape mode, but I certainly would like to multitasking video+something else. As a hack I guess I could play the video sideways in side-by-side mode.
3) gbox. It's okay for a short term solution while I wait for GMS. But there's no way I'd get a chinese phone without GMS and use gbox as a permanent solution.
The good part - you can probably download all your apps, and they'll all mostly run correctly.
The main issue with it: The OS sees gbox, and all the apps running under it as one app: the gbox "machine". That mean't you can't do any OS things to any of the programs individually inside gbox.
If you never use the 'apps' section of settings, then I guess maybe that's okay.
But for example, you can't do things like:
a) see how much storage an individual app is using.
b) flush cache of an app that's misbehaving.
c) set power options for a specific app so the OS doesn't kill it.
d) see in battery monitor which app is killing your battery. etc.
e) block notifications for the app on a whole rather than fight that app's settings menu
Other gbox quirks:
a) google games doesn't seem to work right - or at least some games aren't connecting to it.
b) Some apps are totally crashing on me, like diskusage and geico mobile. but this may be a V2 thing, not a gbox thing.
c) Apps tend to hang at startup. I frequently need to kill them and restart them to get them go. Same with google play - if it's installing and it hangs, I cancel and restart it a couple of times until it finally moves.
d) ads are annoying, but $1 per month to get rid of it for (2 months?) is okay. Too embarrasing to show the phone to someone, and then gbox busts out an ad.
4) The hinge doesn't stay put at all angles. The spring is fairly aggressive, causing the phone to pop open or closed if it's too far open/closed. It's a bit annoying to think you have it open enough and then it sloooowly starts to open more and then it pops open.
I'd say you have to open the phone a minimum of 45ish degrees, and maybe a max of 135 degrees. (45 degrees more than vertical). I don't see a use case of needing < 45. You can't even see/use the inside of the phone anyway.
But note that once you open past 120 degrees, the phone going to fall backwards due to the weight of the camera. It's top heavy. you'll have to put something on the front.
5) vibration is a bit weak, and I'm a bit worried it'll be annoying weak once I put the camera in a better case. Unfortunately it's impossible to get another case before the return period.
Other software quirks:
a) There's no separate inside/outside desktop. It would be nice to have different on-screen shortcuts for inside/outside.
b) Probably related to #1: there's no widgets for the inside screen can span both sides. A full screen calender widget would be cool.
c) I used the 'migrate from phone A to phone B' to import all my apps from my 20x.
Many of them didn't work at all (EDIT: worked after reinstallation though). Several of them worked but couldn't be splitscreened until I reinstalled from gbox.
6) More random notes:
a) the included charger and cable are white on the outside and orange on the inside. That's nice - helps separate it from my other white chargers/cables.
Final thoughts:
Overall, I'm pretty happy with it. It would be nice if the hinge stayed open at more angles, but It's not a big turnoff.
I'm more than a bit concerned about the android auto error dosco88 got though, and there's a small piece of me that thinks I should return the phone just in case it never works. I guess I could use my old phone worst case scenario, but that's annoying for various reasons.
