[Review] Mlais M52 Red Note running review

[WuddaWaste]

I just got my Mlais M52 Red Note a couple of days ago from Gearbest.

This thread is going to be a running review of my thoughts and opinions regarding the phone both as I get to know it, and as I actually have time to write. If you have any questions or anything to add, please feel free.

First, I'll start with the transaction. I bought my phone from Gearbest during their pre-sale phase around a month ago. I spent a few extra bucks for faster shipping. After the pre-sale was over, Gearbest shipped my phone within a few days and it arrived via DHL the following Monday. I believe the total time from the pre-sale ending to the phone actually arriving at my doorstep was just over a week. The phone was well-packaged. The only disappointment was that the phone did not come with an adapter so that I could use the charger in the USA. Poo. Good thing I've got a couple of extra chargers kicking around.

First impressions with the phone were about as-expected. Compared to my previous THL T200C (a 6" phablet), the Mlais M52 Red Note at 5.5" surprisingly felt much much smaller and lighter. It fit better in my pocket, and better in my hand. Being that the battery was supposedly larger than my THL's, I expected a bit more weight. As consistent with [Only registered and activated users can see links Click here to register], I suspect Mlais may have fibbed regarding their battery capacity. More on that later.

As far as the phone's actual style goes, it's a pretty straightforward, nondescript rectangular phone. The back is sleek (and slick), the logo on the rear is unobtrusive, the camera only barely protrudes, and the volume and power buttons both seem sturdy. There are no physical buttons on the front of the phone, but three backlit capacitive buttons instead. The only eyesore to me styling-wise is the hokey "4G" logo plastered in the top right corner of the phone.

Admittedly, by my own personal preference, I had gotten quite used to the on-screen buttons as opposed to these capacitive buttons. For what they are, they seem to work fine, though.

The phone came with a slot for a standard SIM card, a micro-SIM card, and a micro-SD card. I utilized the latter two and was immediately up and running. The startup tone and animation both seemed surprisingly elegant as opposed to what I've seen on other budget phones. The OS loaded and the old familiar AOSP interface was at my fingertips. The display itself looks absolutely stunning. Being a 720p (1280x720) display in a slightly smaller screen than my THL T200C, the Mlais M52 looked downright fantastic. In fact, as I'm staring at the display while writing this (and while Antutu is running), I wouldn't tradeoff the display for a higher resolution if I could. 720p looks fantastic on this device.

Antutu just finished. I'm a happy camper.
I changed the runtime from Dalvik to ART.
The Antutu score came in at 42,598.
BOOYAH!!!

Gotta get back to work. More to come later.

[WuddaWaste]

Up front, I have two significant complaints about the phone. As typical when these things happen, I'm hoping the future Lollipop software release will fix these bugs.

Complaint 1: Although the screen *seems* super responsive and snappy, I'm having a hell of a time writing messages. I am a rapid typist and I send literally hundreds of text messages per day. I'm not sure what it is, but my error rate has exploded since I got this phone. It's either the software not predicting the right stuff, some of my keystrokes not registering, or perhaps a combination of the two. I've used SwiftKey in all of my phones and I was under the impression that my profile followed me from device to device. Perhaps it's that my fingers are used to a 6" form factor as opposed to this 5.5" factor, perhaps it's a difference in sensitivity. Whatever it is, it's driving me nuts. I had to disable SwiftKey Flow and that helped a little. Pressing a touch harder on the screen seems to help a bit too. In any case, if there's one bug that's going to lead me to abandon this phone and revert to my previous one, this would be that bug.

Complaint 2: My version of Waze seems to be kind of messed up. GPS fix works beautifully. However, Waze itself doesn't load the dynamic characters on the screen, and sometimes the fonts look a little hosed. I'm going to try to take this up with the dudes over at Waze (perhaps now Google), but it's something I feel others should be aware of. I'll attach a screenshot so you guys can see what I'm talking about.

   

[WuddaWaste]

Rumor has it that Lollipop for this phone is supposed to be released tomorrow. As far as the little quirks and bugs are concerned, I hope this resolves most (if not all) of them. I'm still exceedingly happy regardless of the bugs, but this has the potential to really cement this phone as my full-time happymaker for many many months to come.

[Bacon_Puffs]

A shame only 2 users clicked like on this. (I was one of them ). Does it really take that much effort to click the Rep button? Okay, I'll stop griping. I just appreciate your work here.

I've noticed that when changing phone sizes, my error rate goes way up as well. Regardless of whether I'm switching down or switching up size. If you're super quick, this will increase the error rate. Has it gotten any better for you? Try to slow down and tap precisely and see if the screen is correctly interpreting where you're typing.

[WuddaWaste]

Thanks, @Bacon_Puffs . It's strange, but the little appreciation things like that go a really long way in keeping us all motivated. I'm happy you guys read my review, let alone took the time to "like" it.

Now that I've had the phone for a few weeks, my error rate has calmed down a bit. If I had to take a guess at what was going on, I'd break it out like this:

Different level of screen sensitivity: 40%
Different form factor: 35%
Swiftkey re-learning: 20%
Slightly buggy screen: 5%

The last factor I only noticed because sometimes when I would draw in Snapchat, weird little fragments would offshoot my lines. It would only happen on lines, though, and not on the random screen-taps I kept trying to simulate typing. (Who knew that Snapchat could be used as a debug tool? Hehe.)

I also had a problem with Swiftkey randomly thinking I was trying to swipe mid-word when I was just rapid-typing. I disabled Swype, but still wondered what was causing it. Maybe I'll re-enable and see if it's somehow magically corrected itself, though I think I'll just wait for Lollipop.

I'm going to try to attach screenshots of both my Snapchat anomaly as well as my Swiftkey typing map. The former might be useful to somebody. The latter will let you guys laugh at how poorly calibrated my thumbs are.

   

   

[WuddaWaste]

OK, so this trend (and especially with this phone) is driving me bonkers: NOT ENOUGH APP SPACE.

For some reason, a lot of phone manufacturers think it's a good idea to partition storage so it's mostly "Phone Storage" (for photos, videos, etc) and hardly any "Internal Storage".

In the M52, the 16GB total space is partitioned for roughly 2GB of Internal Storage and 11GB of Phone Storage. I keep only the apps I use (and I use a lot of apps) on this thing, but it's simply not enough. I have 9GB of Phone Storage free and 200MB of Internal Storage free.

I know I can do the EBR modifications to tweak this phone, but I simply shouldn't have to. This is just outright stupid.

There's supposed to be an OS update available today. I've heard it's still buggy (can't send or receive SMS), but I have yet to hear if they repartitioned to allow for useful app installation. Anyway, just venting. Frustrated. Grr.

This phone has been good, but it's also been far from great. If the Lollipop update doesn't fix a bunch of this stuff I'll end up buying a new phone soon. (Hell, I'll probably end up buying a new one anyway.)

[wolfman7421]

Thanks for your efforts so far... Came here as I've got an M52 (had it a week and it came with Lollipop already installed) and all I've got loaded is WhatsApp (I know, don't say it), Gmail, a launcher (can't bear the Google search bar at the top and it's the only way to get shot of it) and Norton AV and it's struggling for space. I have an Archos A50 and that takes way more apps with apparently less internal storage... :/

Got some music on phone storage and that's all...

The new OTA update was supposed to be released today but nothing so far...

Quite like the phone so is it worth backtracking to 4.4 or having a bit of patience and waiting for the proper release of the 5.0 update??

[WuddaWaste]

Welcome to CPA @wolfman7421 !

If Mlais would get their shiznit together and release a stable update for this phone they would have a lot of happy customers. They showed a lot of promise over the past few weeks but didn't seem to quite hit it on the head. They are still claiming that the OTA which is coming shortly will fix more things, but my confidence is down about them.

If it were me (and I wasn't as lazy as I am) I would downgrade to KitKat.

KitKat has a 2GB Internal Storage partition whereas I think Lollipop on your phone has a 1.2GB Internal Storage partition. This is where a lot of your problems are coming from.

I can also confirm that WhatsApp works on KitKat.

As of today, I'm just about ready to go looking to buy a new phone. I'm starting to get really frustrated the all the small things which don't work here. I hope your experience is better than mine. Especially with the keyboard. Stupid f@#king keyboard. Haha.

---

So far I've seen one person claim that the OTA Lollipop push works fine on their device. Hmmm.

[wolfman7421]

Cheers dude. Looks like I've got a fun weekend ahead ;)

Wouldn't mind so much if it would actually install to the phone memory or SD card instead but choosing these options does nothing different, still the same error message. Other than that (I can cope with the keyboard) it's a great phone, just missing all my crap :/

[WuddaWaste]

As a worst case scenario there's a method for adjusting partition size. It's highlighted in our tutorials section, I believe. It involves using a hex editor to manually tweak the EBR1 and EBR2 files. I'm only hesitant to do this because Mlais is on the verge of supposedly releasing working updates. It'd be a shame to bork our phones to look like something else and then miss the easy OTA update. So... I'm standing by for another week or two to see what happens.