HOW TO SELECT A GOOD CHINESE MTK6577 PHONE PART 2

This article is an extension of my previous article here.

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. And here is the picture on the site. Again the name is spelt wrong...LOL!

So let's get on with deciding if this MTK6577 Dual core Phone is worth buying. Using the same techniques from my 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.

Memory Size is only 503mb 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.

Next, we look at cameras. The 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.
On the right, the front camera is 0.3mp which is only a VGA camera but interpolated to 1.9mp. Actually, a real 8 megapixel camera is not on every phone so it is pretty good to have a real 8mp camera on this. Most other phones are advertised to have 8mp cameras but actually the cameras are 5mp interpolated to 8. Front camera of 0.3mp is sufficient for video calls with less data needing to be transferred which is a good thing. The only bad thing is you want to take a self portrait shot you are going to get a low resolution picture.

Finally I would like to say this phone has the real Galaxy Note 2 brushed metal look which makes it more Note 2 like. LED notification light is most like omitted here.

If you buy from Fastcardtech, you can change that android logo to Samsung logo. As far as I know, many other online retailers are unable to provide this service.

To conclude, the phone is priced reasonably at $185 with Free Shipping and I would give this phone the go ahead and buy stamp. Check it out here- HDC Galaxy Note 2 Mega
Update: I just ordered this phone on 18 Jan 2013 and now waiting...Youtube review coming.