A bezel-less smartphone that you never heard of!

An unsung beauty!

Elephone is one of those companies that are still setting their base on Indian soil. They've had several successful devices in the past and they want to get into the most popular budget segment too, with their Elephone S3 smartphone. So what exactly are you getting for your money here? Let's find out in the Elephone S3 review.

Design: Gorgeous. That's all I have to say about it. Just gorgeous! Look at the pics, that phone like like a stunning 50K flagship, and feels nice on the hand as well. It's made out of magnesium, weighing 169 gm and 8.3mm in thickness. The design and build quality is just too good for the price, trust me. You'll love what you get here and others will also adore what they see. Volume rocker and power/sleep key are on the right, both very well finished and clicky. The phone comes in 4 color variants: grey, gold, silver and rose-gold.

One of the better displays I've seen

Display: The phone is ticking a 5.2' 1080p IPS LCD panel at 424 ppi. The screen is made of 3D curved glass, so it looks sleek and stylish. Similar to the back panel of the Xiaomi mi5, without the pronounced edges on either sides like an S7 edge. Just a clean and elegant bezel less design! It's really well thought out and ia welcome change to what we've been seeing so far on the budget segment. Way to go, Elephone!

My only complaint with this gorgeous looking screen, is the brightness. It doesn't get very bright and the edges glare out more sunlight and make still it harder see the display outdoors. Can't get everything under a budget, now can we?

Performance: This is the place where I was thrown back. The premium-ness weakens a bit as the spec sheet seems to be lacking behind the present powerful standards. The phone runs on an octacore Mediatek MT6753 processor clocked at 1.3 GHz and 3GB of DDR3 RAM and Mali MP-T720 GPU. Though MTK-6753 is a powerful processor, it's not something that's exceptionally effecient at the price. In fact it's available in cheaper phones now.

Even the GPU doesn't seem very well optimised as there were a few graphic rendering issues while playing intense games like Real Racing 3. There weren't much stutters or major lags but there were these glitchy instances. I don't think it was the game's bug that was causing it. Oh well! It's still good enough for gaming though, keeping the minor graphic glitches aside. There's 16GB of on-board storage expandable up to another 128GB via microSD card.

The UI is called ELE UI which runs on top of Android 6.0 marshmallow. UI initially had some bugs but on its update has been out which promises bug fixes and smoother performance. It's fluid to use and definitely reliable as a daily driver👍.

There's a rear mounted fingerprint sensor. It works well, but not as fast to recognize your fingerprints, as it's competitors, like the Meizu m3 note or the Redmi note 3.

Camera: The phone has a 13mp rear Sony sensor with 1.24 um pixel size and f/2.2 aperture. The front camera is a 5mp sensor. Cameras are just average in my opinion. I mean to say they're good, but could've been better. The images sometimes come out to be with washed out colors. Dynamic range and exposure are fine.

The 1080p video at 30 fps has the same washed out colors, like the leaves on a plant don't come out natural green but look faded out. Thankfully there is no major shutter lag or anything like that. The camera app is fast and easy to use.

The selfie camera is pretty good, produces detailed pictures with plenty of light. It's camera sensors are totally reliable as long as you don't mind the colors shifted to a more faded shade😅.

Rather small battery pack

Battery: The phone has a 2100 mAh battery inside it. Seems measly for modern days doesn't it. Well, yes and no! It is certainly lacking in terms of standby and usage time but not a total disaster like I though. It gets you almost a day on moderate usage but you'll definitely have to plug in by dinnertime though. Elephone people, seriously?! It's 2017, come on! We need more power to go with that breathtaking design.

Price: I did mention it was intended for a budget market, and you'll get it for 10,700 INR. If you're all about classy looks and want a phone that can turn some heads, this is it. But if you want an overall best package with good cameras and decent battery life, there are certainly better options out there.

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