It’s not a surprise that more and more big brands are venturing into the smartphone market – and one of the latest addition into the pool is TP-Link with their own smartphone line called Neffos. Here, we’re taking a look at the Neffos C5 – TP-Link’s current flagship smartphone in the market.
The Neffos C5 comes in a rather thick box, while the phone fits snugly in the box. The unboxing experience is pretty standard here, with the usual layering and placement of all the included contents.
Digging deeper is where two compartments are found – one for the charger itself, and another for the USB cable and included earphones.
Right off the bat, the Neffos C5 started off good, as there is a complete set of accessories that is included. We will not be dealing with the earphones.
It does look pretty nice with the all white and silver colour scheme, alongside with the inclusion of in-line buttons. However as you can see, the eartips themselves are not favourable.
The set of included accessories here is lacking one or two valuable additions – a screen protector, and a case. Leagoo understood their customers really well, and they at least included a film screen protector in the box.
[nextpage title=”Design”]The Neffos C5 is a smartphone with 5-inch screen – not so common these days – with a rounded edges at the side, and no more than 3 buttons total. All of the three buttons are found on the right side of the Neffos C5 – which are the volume up and down, and finally the power button.
At the top is where the usual placement of the 3.5mm audio jack is found, and the bottom is where the micro USB port is found. Pretty standard all around.
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While we’re at the bottom-side of the Neffos C5, I’d like to highlight one design element that the Neffos C5, and that’s the shiny bottom chin. Not sure why they did it, but at least it’s buried beneath the glass, flushed with the screen itself, and not having a sandpaper effect when touched.
While on the subject of the bottom chin, there is no capacitive button on the Neffos C5, which is something that I really want all of the other manufacturers to follow. One additional feature that Neffos could have opted is to give users the option to swap positions between back and multitask button, and you’re instantly golden.
You might have seen that the battery is separated from the smartphone itself when unboxed, and that’s obviously because the Neffos C5 comes with a removable 2,200mAh battery – more on this later. Now, lets explore the Neffos C5’s back.
[nextpage title=”Connectivity”]Removing the Neffos C5’s flexi-plastic back cover reveals the two 4G-compatible micro SIM card slots, alongside with a microSD card slot. It’s definitely a nice addition to have both SIM card slots to have 4G compatibility, as even the higher end ZenFone series of smartphones with dual SIM slots only supports 4G on first slot, 2G on the other.
Based on what I can see after removing the back cover, there are no pogo pins on the Neffos C5, which means any sort of additional features like a case with integrated battery pack or NFC chip is out of the question.
Going a little sideways though, the speaker is biased to the bottom left corner at the back of Neffos C5. Those who use their phones with their left hands should be aware, as it will definitely block the mono speaker.
[nextpage title=”Display”]The Neffos C5 sports a 5-inch 720p IPS display, which is to say is a decent screen for a smartphone of this price. The colours are well-saturated while the screen is bright enough to be used under direct sunlight.
There is one thing I’d like to point out about the display – the smoothness. The entire front of the phone is covered in one single piece of glass, and the whole glass is held and protected by a lipped rim around it. It provides glass some sort of protection but traps dirt at the edge of the glass and lipped rim.
[nextpage title=”Camera”]What can I say – the Neffos C5 comes with a 8MP rear-facing camera, and a 5MP front-facing camera. It’s rather unusual to see sensors with 8MP resolution still exist in the market today, but since we’re doing an unbiased review here, we obviously have a take a look at what the camera has to offer.
I took many other pictures, but I think this picture alone can summarize the picture quality coming out of the Neffos C5. Firstly, the image is totally washed out. There is a heavy loss in detail, with the entire image being sort of blurry. Not-so-magically though, blurring the image is a common way to counter noise in a still image taken in dimly lit conditions.
The camera on the Neffos C5 obviously didn’t score well even if pictures were taken solely for social media purposes – every picture will need to have its contrast tweaked a little. I do wish that Neffos would at least include a better sensor or recalibrate their colour reproduction a little to take some decent pictures that look great when viewed at <50%.
[nextpage title=”Software”]I’m not sure what’s Neffos’s calling their own skin that was laid upon Android 5.1 Lollipop, but what I do know is that Neffos’s launcher is called Fine Home – and it has an included theme engine. There aren’t many themes to choose from – at the time of this review, there are only 14 themes available, with only 9 of them being free. The other themes are priced at what I presumed to be USD $1 and USD$2, since it’s listed as RM8.12 and RM4.08.
For some reason though, the themes change everything related to the Fine Home only, but not anywhere else on the system. If the font is changed however, it changes system-wide – including Facebook, WhatsApp, everything else.
The “theme” app itself has 4 different categories to choose from – first option to change the theme entirely – both lock screen and home wallpapers, and icon pack – live wallpaper, lock screen wallpaper only, and font. I think Neffos could have done it better with the option to apply every module of the theme independently. Think of it like buying an entire music album for one or two songs out of the 18 included ones.
The experience overall is pretty near stock Android with snappy performance and has minimal bloatware, other than the compass, photo editor, mirror, email, system manager, weather, and themes app. It’s pretty weird to see the included apps couldn’t be updated through the Google Play Store, but they have to be manually updated by launching the app, and telling the app to search for new updates. Then, it’ll download from where I presume is Neffos’s own server, and install it as a third-party app. Case and point is the included Weather app.
[nextpage title=”Performance”]I mentioned snappy performance – and that’s actually true, coming from a smartphone that has a quad-core MediaTek MT6735 processor, paired with Mali-T720 GPU. Running the usual benchmark suite shows that the Neffos C5 has the expected performance for the price of it.
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The average FPS on Epic Citadel tells us that the Neffos C5 is pretty okay for light gaming, but nothing beyond that. As for Vellamo scores however, I tried to run the browser benchmark with Neffos’s built-in browser, but it crashed. Then I tried to run the Metal benchmark, and it refused to start at all. Then I moved to the multicore test first, and went back to Metal. Surprisingly, it works this time and I have no idea why.
Based on what I can tell you throughout my usage of the Neffos C5, the thermals are a little bit extreme on this device – not because it’s too hot, but because it’s too cool. The Neffos C5 is thermally capped at about 45℃ – that’s it. I found this out because I was playing Angry Birds 2 – which actually is a hardware-taxing game – and I realized occasional frame jumps all over the place.
When I’m not gaming however, the Neffos C5 does the job well done.
[nextpage title=”Battery”]The most important aspect of smartphone these days, isn’t it? Packed with only 2,200mAh battery, it seriously gone nanotechnology on the capacity. When I’m playing Angry Birds 2 for an extended period of 20 minutes straight, the battery was drained quite quickly, but was better than expected. Of course thermal throttling comes into equation – and there’s actually no option to disable it by going into turbo mode or something like that for those who seek performance rather than battery life.
Then comes the charger. Compared against the Leagoo Alfa 2 which we reviewed here, the Neffos C5 has a sub-par charger at best. By today’s standard, 5V 1A is quite obsolete, and apparently Neffos C5 is still using that. At least the Leagoo Alfa 2 takes in 5V 1.5A for a slightly higher wattage for a significantly faster charging speed.
That said, the charger is not a two-prong style which is fragile-yet-compact enough to be thrown into a thin pouch to be carried around – but actually looks good with the triangular shape with rounded edges.
[nextpage title=”Wrap up”]So what exactly do I think about the Neffos C5? It’s the first smartphone by a newcomer, TP-Link. The phone feels good on the hand, and the screen is nice. Both the camera and battery needs definitely needs improvement, the software needs tweaking, and so does the included accessory pack. The design is typical, but Neffos managed to make it a little different from the others. Overall, for the price of RM539, Neffos earned their chance to be a future competitor in the market.
Where to buy?
As of now, the entire Neffos product line is exclusive to Lazada Malaysia, and you can find the link here!
Click here to check out Neffos on Lazada!
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