Axgio Neon N1 Hands On Review

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Announced earlier this Monday, Axgio’s new product Neon N1 packs the hardware of MTK6582 chipset, 5-inch 720P display, 1GB RAM, 8GB Nand Flash, and 8MP camera. Neonado 1.0， third-party system, which is the most well-known bright spot.



The good: Neonado 1.0 system published with its sole aerial view, containing flash light’s switch, running list and memory’s cleaning switch. It really hit the sweet spot as Samsung sidebar and Iphone control center. Back cover bends gradually in a small angle, which performed as a perfect touch.
The bad: N1 will suffer from a light fever as it’s been operated for some time. Android 4.2 and luxury themes consume power seriously.

The bottom line: To compete with big brand cellphones in China, this second generation of Axgio opens up a new route. With a higher 8 GB’s ROM, N1 win by a narrow margin, compared to the very first Axgio W2. Surprisingly they are both with MTK6582 chipset and 1GB RAM. On a whole, it has various features as ordinary Chinese cellphones do. Nice and soft touching leaving a great impression to customers.

Design

When I take first sight of N1, its metal bezel is attractive, extremely thin and natty body shows the quality of the phone. N1 bears a striking resemblance to the design of the THL T6S -- especially the curved back case, which makes user easy to hold it, and the gap between back case and fuselage is narrow enough to prevent dust. I quite like this feel. It sits comfortably in my hand, though the edges of the fuselage are not smooth. The handset, headphone jack and charging pot of the phone set on the top, which have quite a premium feel, the speaker appears on the bottom. The power and volume rockers are on the different sides, easy to reach without any strenuous finger stretching. Such a standard size of N1 should fit into most pockets with ease.



Display

The 5 inch display has a 1280*720 pixels resolution. While that’s the same number of pixels you will find on the last model of Axgio. When you take N1 to compare with 1080p screens on Samsung S5 or Note 3, maybe you will feel a little meager, but you will find out differences alongside the screen with same resolution like DG2014. N1 can tackle small details on bright and dark spot of pictures. The colors of images remained true to show its original status, although N1's 294ppi display is just shy of the pixel density on other 1080P phone. It still beats most of 720P screen phones, so the display of N1 can get a good mark. Here is the picture about comparison between N1 and other 720P screen phones.



The mid one is N1

System

Now we begin to show you the highlight of N1, the customized OS Neonado, which specific optimize for MTK chipset, aims to improve using experience. Compare to other third party systems, Neonado breaks their common limitations. It is the only one customized OS supports multi languages, like English, Spanish, Italian, Russian, German, French and Chinese. Neonado bases on Android 4.2, but mainly inherits LEWA OS. Neonado offers a humane interaction. It has a whole suite of features you don't normally see on Android.

Instead of an app drawer, Neonado puts every app on the home screen just like IOS, but I much prefer to put my apps to the drawer, because when you install more and more apps on the phone, the home screen will become cluttered, users need to face difficulties of searching app they want to use. Besides, Neonado also has an aerial view screen, which gathers some small tools in the one interface, alarm clock, power manage, flash light and traffic monitor, just like Samsung side bar or iPhone control center. You can scan and clean up the memory via this screen.

The ability to customize how it looks is useful as well. You can easily load up the themes, or download a whole bunch of themes from the online themes store or Neonado forum, and if you're a big fan of MIUI, there's also a way to convert MIUI into LEWA theme file, which you can put it on the local theme folder, to enjoy the same using experience with XiaoMi.

Most of android phones supports 2SIM 2Standby, but it is inconvenient to use, on the contrary, Neonado makes efforts to this shortcoming, users can change 2SIM cards freely without extra setting. Meanwhile, N1 has completed GMS service framework, the same with Google Nexus series, guarantees original Google experience. Although the system has installed some apps like YouTube, Twitter and Whatsapp etc, users can uninstall them to provide more spaces for daily use. The most important things for customized OS are updates for system and ROM’s download, in this aspect, Neonado does a good job. It supports OTA updates, and several ROMs on Neonado forum offer to users to download. The last function I want to say is smart sensor, which you can answer the phone call without touching. On the whole, Neonado is a decent customized OS.







Performance

When you operate Neonado OS, you will feel smooth control sense, because the ROM of N1 is specific design for MTK chipset, better than other MTK smartphones with different operating systems, so Axgio N1 delivered decent performance comparable to other mid-notch mobiles. I started the AnTuTu benchmark and tested the phone, the final score is 16690, this result is reasonable with such average hardware level, 1.3GHz MTK6582 Quad-core processor, 1GB RAM and 8GB ROM.The follow screenshots show details about benchmark.





Camera
The Neon N1’s front-facing camera only has 2 mega pixels, and 8-megapixel shooter sits on the rear, above the LED flash. The camera offers several features, like smile face mode, continuous shoot mode and Panorama mode etc. What’s more, the camera integrates some functions of third-party apps, like real time filter and weather seal, which makes you preview the effect of picture at once.

In normal mode, the quality of picture reaches the standard level of cellphone photograph. Especially the image with adequate light can show its smoothness. In smile face mode, the camera will catch your smiling face automatically。 Panorama mode is where I try most times, as it's admittedly pretty cool. In Panorama mode, you can compress the whole 360°view into a strip image.





Conclusion

The biggest advantage of Neon N1 is price, if you search for the phone with same configurations. You will find that it’s even $30 lower than other, so it is really a smartphone worth trying to get your hands on. Maybe N1 could not rank as one of the best smartphone with customized OS on the market. However, it should be a cost-effective choice for people who want to experience a new operating system.