Wednesday, August 7, 2013

Zopo 958

My Samsung i8150 suffered a rather premature death after around 1 year of usage.  Within that year, I bought four batteries for it.  It is not exactly dead but it keeps on rebooting itself randomly, in the worse case, you just even cannot use it.  Battery drains very quickly while self-rebooting.

While we have cases about electric shock with iphone, we have explosion with Samsung devices, and thus I took the plunge to buy a Chinese brand mobile phone.  After some initial feedback from real users, I have decided to give Zopo a chance.

I love to play Ukulele and so the ability to see music scores would be a huge plus to me, so I aim myself at those big models at 5.7" IPS screen, and so 950, 950H and 958 were my targets.  950 was a bit old, 950H and 958 differs by only one or two hundreds, so I get the one with highest specifications.  I won't repeat all the specifications here since they could be fetched from the web very easily, here I give some general impression after one week of very active usage.


Two original batteries were included in the package.  The manufacturer rated capacity is not very meaningful, and I was a pretty active user, and the battery can last for a whole day given I turned off 3G data when I sleep.  For the rest of time, either Wifi or 3G were used actively.  Charging the battery is like 4-5 hours from my impression, either the charger and the battery is not hot during the process.  Given its huge screen, it's very good indeed. 

The screen is very good, but it could be a bit finer.  It serves the purpose of showing music scores very well.  However, the scrolling action is a bit too sensitive, sometimes when I wanted to scroll, it would yield a "select" action instead.  But with some more training and adaptation, this could be reduced to a good level.

In order to use it with Windows 8, you have to search in the web for PdaNetA4126, you will then have the necessary driver installed.

Changjei is missing from this machine but you have to install "Go" for that, but Chinese punctuation is not well supported, the character sequence is not very nice as well.  Some frequent wordings were not placed in the first few locations.

One hand operation is possible in most cases given by small hand despite the 5.7" screen.

If this phone could survive one year of active usage, I would think it justifies.