For a couple of days now, I am an owner of a Siswoo Longbow C55. It’s a 5.5″ Chinese smartphone with an interesting set of specs for the 130 EUR it costs. For one, it has a removable battery with 3300mAh. That powers the phone for two days which I consider to be quite good. A removable battery is harder and harder to get these days :-/ But I absolutely want to be able to replace the battery in case it’s worn out, hard reboot it when it locks up, or simply make sure that it’s off. It also has 802.11a WiFi which seems to be rare for phones in that price range. Another very rare thing these days is an IR interface. The Android 5.1 based firmware also comes with a remote control app to control various TVs, aircons, DVRs, etc. The new Android version is refreshing and is fun to use. I don’t count on getting updates though, although the maker seems to be open about it.
The does not have NFC, but something called hotknot. The feature is described as being similar to NFC, but works with induction on the screen. So when you want to connect two devices, you need to make the screens touch. I haven’t tried that out yet, simply because I haven’t seen anyone with that technology yet. It also does not have illuminated lower buttons. So if you’re depending on that then the phone does not work for you. A minor annoyance for me is the missing notification LED. I do wonder why such a cheap part is not being built into those cheap Chinese phones. I think it’s a very handy indicator and it annoys me to having to power on the screen only to see whether I have received a message.
I was curious whether the firmware on the phone matches the official firmware offered on the web site. So I got hold of a GNU/Linux version of the flashtool which is Qt-based BLOB. Still better than running Windows… That tool started but couldn’t make contact with the phone. I was pulling my hair out to find out why it wouldn’t work. Eventually, I took care of ModemManager, i.e. systemd disable ModemManager or do something like sudo mv /usr/share/dbus-1/system-services/org.freedesktop.ModemManager1.service{,.bak} and kill modem-manager. So apparently it got in the way when the flashtool was trying to establish a connection. I have yet to find out whether this
/etc/udev/rules.d/21-android-ignore-modemmanager.rules
works for me:
ACTION!="add|change|move", GOTO="mm_custom_blacklist_end"
SUBSYSTEM!="usb", GOTO="mm_custom_blacklist_end"
ENV{DEVTYPE}!="usb_device", GOTO="mm_custom_blacklist_end"
ATTR{idVendor}=="0e8d", ATTR{idProduct}=="2000", ENV{ID_MM_DEVICE_IGNORE}="1"
LABEL="mm_custom_blacklist_end"
I “downloaded” the firmware off the phone and compared it with the official firmware. At first I was concerned because they didn’t hash to the same value, but it turns out that the flash tool can only download full blocks and the official images do not seem to be aligned to full blocks. Once I took as many bytes of the phone’s firmware as the original firmware images had, the hash sums matched. I haven’t found a way yet to get full privileges on that Android 5.1, but given that flashing firmware works (sic!) it should only be a matter of messing with the system partition. If you have any experience doing that, let me know.
The device performs sufficiently well. The battery power is good, the 2GB of RAM make it unlikely for the OOM killer to stop applications. What is annoying though is the sheer size of the device. I found 5.0″ to be too big already, so 5.5″ is simply too much for my hands. Using the phone single handedly barely works. I wonder why there are so many so huge devices out there now. Another minor annoyance is that some applications simply crash. I guess they don’t handle the 64bit architecture well or have problems with Android 5.1 APIs.
FWIW: I bought from one of those Chinese shops with a European warehouse and their support seems to be comparatively good. My interaction with them was limited, but their English was perfect and, so far, they have kept what they promised. I pre-ordered the phone and it was sent a day earlier than they said it would be. The promise was that they take care of the customs and all and they did. So there was absolutely no hassle on my side, except that shipping took seven days, instead of, say, two. At least for my order, they used SFBest as shipping company.
Do you have any experience with (cheap) Chinese smartphones or those shops?
