We’ve reviewed quite a bunch of Allview phones up until now, but one more can’t hurt, right? This is the first quad core phone from Allview, the P5 Quad and we’re going to break it down to you in detail. Allview P5 Quad is priced at around $300 and it’s a Jelly Bean device with a quad core CPU inside.
The design involves a soft touch back, rectangular form factor and sadly the screen is too small for the big body, if you ask me. The P5 Quad measures 9.8 mm in thickness, weighs 140.7 grams and the back cover is easy to remove, revealing the slots: dual SIM and microSD. We’ve got 3 capacitive buttons on the front side and solid buttons on the side. The device feels light in the hand and it’s not so easy to use with one hand.
We’ve got a solid and discrete metal frame around the handset and the hardware includes a Mediatek MT6589 processor, a quad core Cortex A7 1.2 GHz CPU, with a PowerVR SGX 544 GPU. The display upfront is a 4.5 incher with a qHD resolution and IPS LCD panel. Other specs include a GPS, 3G video call, 4 GB of storage (2 GB available) and 1 GB of RAM.
The microSD included here supports up to 32 GB in extra storage and we also get an FM radio with RDS and a Yamaha audio amplifier. At the back we’ve got an 8 megapixel camera with LED flash, while upfront there’s a 1 MP shooter. On the connectivity side, there’s WiFi dual band, DLNA, Bluetooth 4.0, WiFi Direct, microUSB, dual SIM and dual standby. Allview P5 Quad uses a G Sensor, proximity sensor, light sensor and compass and finally on board you’ll find a Li Polymer battery with a 2100 mAh capacity.
On paper this battery provides 230 hours of standby and 400 minutes of 2G talk time. The battery is actually excellent in our tests, so we got a day and a half of use from it, or about 5 hours of continuous gaming. As far as the audio goes, we’ve got excellent volume, good bass and very good keyboard and guitar reproduction in songs.
Sadly, at maximum volume we do get a bit of distorsion. The headphones are pretty good and they have an impressive volume. Moving further to the video, this is where the 4.5 inch IPS QHD display comes into play. This screen offers good viewing angles, excellent contrast, vivid colors, good sunlight behaviour and OK brightness.
On the phone call side, we get an excellent volume and clarity and now we move to the 8 megapixel camera here, that relies on an Omnivision OV8830 sensor. We can tweak the exposure, color effects and we’ve got a ton of scene modes to use, as shown in the video review below. White balance is also here and the camera does Full HD video capture, for those of you wondering.
The pics are filled with noise and grain indoors, but on the bright side we’ve got a very good HDR. The filming is taken in 3GPP, so the quality isn’t exactly stellar. Benchmarks are reasonably good, with 3934 points in Quadrant, beating the Allview P6 Stony, that has 2620 points and being close to the HTC One X, that has 6000 points with Jelly Bean. In NenaMark 2 we scored 53.2 FPS, impressive compared to the Allview P6, at 17.8 FPS. We were actually close to the Galaxy S II, that has 54 FPS.
AnTuTU brings us 13.112 points for P5 Quad, beating even the HTC One X, with its 12k points. Vellamo offers 1400 points, beating the likes of Galaxy Nexus and Xperia S. Speaking of software, Allview P5 Quad runs Android 4.1.2, covered with the UI offered by Allview. Widgets and icons are original and come with the unique interface, with some themes to work with.
The music app also has an original UI and the device is bundled with Bitdefender Mobile Security, torch, Notes app and a One Clean solution. Office Suite is also here and finally in 3D Mark we scored 2974 points, about 5 times lower than the best Android phones out there. We even showed you a game, to get an idea of how the device runs.
Finally, here’s the Pros and Cons list for the device. Here are the Pros:
- good price
- nice design
- Jelly Bean on board
- very good performance
- good battery
- loud volume
- good display
- themes and effects
And here are the Cons:
- low resolution
- diagonal could have been bigger
- camera below expectations
Overall, we give the device a 9 out of 10 for design, 8.5 for hardware and 10 for OS and UI. The final grade is 9.16 out of 10 for the Allview P5 Quad, which is a midrange quad core phone.
