There were a lot of discussions before the actual phone release regarding the 3G bands; we can say that the version which is shipping now is identical to our sample and features 2100MHz/850MHz bands; this may upset a little potential customers in Europe since 3G is usually available here on 2100MHz/900MHz but iOCEAN has hinted that this version may be available in the near future (to be more exact, the announcement was made on Facebook).

As the X7S, the X8 is a dual-sim smartphone with an ingenious combo metallic tray which can house at the same time one microSIM and one nanoSIM. At its core, we will get to see the same MTK 6592 octa-core SoC which is clocked at 1.7Ghz, while the video interface is taken care of the Mali-450 at 700MHz. During our tests we have seen that the latest graphics-intensive games run smooth, with only some small exceptions when we have experienced FPS drops but this phenomenon lasted like half a second and sometimes can be caused by an application running in the background.

With the X8 we can say bye-bye to the expandable memory since the microSDHC card slot is now gone but in order to compensate this the manufacturer has doubled the internal NAND capacity to 32GB. With the initial partition set as 4GB, the remaining space for storing all kinds of data is about 24GB, which can be considered decent if we are also used to work with OTG drives and cloud space in order to offload data which is not frequently accessed.

Regarding the battery life, some people were worried by the 2000mAh capacity on the X7S and were forced to either live with it or buy the 3000mAH model, which also required the replacement of the back cover so the smartphone would become more bulky. Thanks to the non-removable battery design on the X8, the manufacturer has succeeded to fit one Li-Po 2650mAh which brings enough extra standby time.

With the X8, iOCEAN also has brought to the market a professional-looking device, by mixing a metallic chassis and glass (Gorilla Glass III in front and Asahi Glass in the back) and the volume and On/Off buttons are made of Stainless Steel.

The software is quite similar to the one on the X7S, but this time we have some extra gestures added like the very useful tap-to-wake and functions for using the screen with gloves on or accessibility menu to help when using the phone one-handed.

The Bluetooth and GPS interfaces work quite well, but not excellent as we would have liked, so let’s get a little in more detail. We have tested the Bluetooth interface with both the Sony Smartwatch v1 and the Creative T4 Wireless Speaker System: with the speakers the X8 worked beautifully, without interruptions or distortions during playback, but this is mainly one-direction communication. We have then installed the applications and fired up our Sony Smartwatch for synchronization on the X8; while the initial setup went fine, during the following days we have experienced random disconnects and in order to avoid this we had to disable the Bluetooth connection manually or reconnect and sometimes we even had to restart the smartphone. If the GPS was activated at the same time we had situations when after we have turned off the Bluetooth interface, we could not turn it on again without a restart.

To test the GPS accuracy out, we have used Runkeeper and Runtastic for both walking and biking activities. With the launch firmware version, we had issues with the GPS meaning that some spikes appeared on the map at random places, telling us that we have traveled from one parallel street to another with high speeds; these errors were gone after flashing the latest ROM version, but there is still some room for improvement regarding accuracy since on some road portions we are reported unusually high travel speeds. What needs to be mentioned is that these mentioned issues are not iOCEANs fault at all and we need to point this to MediaTeK this time since most of the terminals based on the 6592 octa-core experience the same symptoms but hopefully they will issue some fixes in the near future. Speaking of the near future, iOCEAN is now testing Android Kit-Kat 4.4.2 on both X7S and X8 and it would be very interesting to see how these models perform afterwards.

We did really like what iOCEAN has done with the X8 regarding the quality of materials and we would also like to see a smaller version (maybe 4.7inch?), while keeping a high battery capacity so the phone would fit in much more pockets as with the current 5.7’’ screen size and the re-introduction of the microSDHC card slot could not hurt either.

The iOCEAN X8 is available online for just 260 Euros.

iOCEAN X8 octa-core Smartphone is Recommended For:

We would like to thank again to iOCEAN for making this review possible!