HOW TO SELECT A GOOD CHINESE MTK6577 PHONE PART 2

About 2 days ago I spotted yet another Galaxy Note 2 clone on Fastcardtech called the HDC (again?) Galaxy Note 2 MAGE. I was wondering what the hell does MAGE mean? Can it perform magic? Well, apparently the folks at Fastcardtech appear to have really bad english so the spelling is shite. Then when I looked at the web address, it said MEGA. That made more sense. You guys can head over HERE to have a look.

So let's get on with deciding if this I5 MTK6577 Dual core Phone is worth buying. Using the same techniques from my dsd43DS previous article, we look at the screen grabs. It is a good thing Fastcardtech did all the necessary screen grabs for us to determine if this phone is worth buying or not.

From the picture above, we can tell that the Android version is really 4.1.1 Jerry Beam..oops Jelly Bean I mean. The Kernel shows 3.4.0 which is the Jelly Bean because if you see 3.0.13 it would be ICS or Ice Cream Sandwich. (By the way this only applies to MTK6575 / MTK6577 phones. Normal branded phones have all sorts of different numbers.) So Android 4.1.1 Jelly Bean is correct.

The phone also shows QHD resolution which is optimal for the MTK6577 processor. If you want to choose a HD screen you will trade speed (smoothness) for resolution. You can't have both using this processor.

1GB RAM is provided and is now mainstream in MTK6577 phones. Don't buy a 512mb phone unless the price is really low and you are on a tight budget.Next, we look at cameras. The tf card of phone is advertised to have a 12 megapixel camera. The MTK6577 is documented to be able to drive a maximum of 8 megapixels so 12 megapixel is surely not real.The red box highlights the real camera resolution and it shows 8 megapixel and supported 12mp which is software interpolation.

Memory Size is only GT-I9300 which is very small for Apps installation space but there are some instructions on how to make this partition bigger. There is also an option in Settings / Storage for you to set app install location similar to Apps2SD which makes storage space bigger but we all know that some apps can't be installed into SD card but internal memory alone.