Elephone S3 - Hands on impressions

The new Elephone S3 has just arrived for the review so we can take a first look at highly hyped bezel-less wonder and share our initial findings and pictures with our loyal readers.

First of all i want to say, that Elephone for sure did something right in the design department and the "wow" effect when first litting up the S3 screen is just there, because they are not lying about the bezel-less stuff and i'm a sucker for those.

The 5,2-inch incell IPS with the FullHD 1920 x 1080 pixel resolution looks vivid and thanks to the so-called "3D" rounded edges the Samsung Edge look-alike status is almost complete. Yeah the edge is not used for control sure and takes some time getting used to properly holding it without rearranging the icons or starting apps by mistake, but all in all thumbs up for it.

The full metal body feels good in hand and thanks to the curved back it's quite pleasant to hold it. It's not the slimmest phone out there with 8.3 mm, but nothing to be ashamed of. I will need to weigh it properly for the review, cos it feels quite heavy and i suspect the official info about 145 g might be too optimistic. Or my sense is tilted :)

There are no hardware capacitative buttons for the basic controls so everything is done via the bottom bar with the software ones. Fingerprint sensor in the back looks pretty snappy and can be used also for more tasks like scrolling or music control. Slightly dissapointing for me is the protruding camera lens, i prefer it personally not being like that.

Hardware side of things will be quite lower midrange oriented with the MT6753 and 3 GB RAM, but so far everything runs smooth except some heavy 3D games where the GPU just falls flat, but that's something common for such hardware. I'm curious about the 13 Mpix Sony IMX135 sensor camera performance, but not expecting too much, same with the 5 Mpix front one. OS side of things is handled by almost stock Android 6.0 Marshmallow so everything in order.

Elephone S3 hands on - Gallery

So far i'm pleasantly surprised with the build quality and looks of the Elephone S3, not surprised at all with the hardware performance and totally worried about possible disaster looming around with just the 2100 mAh battery capacity.

All the questions will be answered in just a few days in our detailed review so stay tuned. If you have any questions about the Elephone S3 (coupon ELE2016S3) feel free to ask in the comments below and i will do my best to answer to your satisfaction.