Lately I have got my smartphones very cheap from chineese stores like Pandawill and Aliexpress. It is a great way to get very cheap phones that are of great value and use. Often you can get high end phones to a fifth of the price they cost here in Sweden.
BUT! (there is always a but)
You have to be able to hack them your self. Never rely on such a fine eco system that Apple and Samsung provide. If you do that, you are guaranteed to be dissaponted.
Some months ago my wife declared that IOS just wasn´t cutting it anymore. And to be honest, since Steve left the building, they have lost their grip big times.
She wanted a phone that was capable of two sim cards, a file system, a usable bluetooth and a gui that was intuitive enough to use without fiddling with the phone 24/7. Eat that, fan boys…
After scanning the market for some days my recommendation to my wife was an Elephone P10. Powerful enough and on sale for only 86$ including shipping to Sweden. The qute bright yellow colour gave it enough of WAF and a purchase was a fact.
Now, to be honest, Elephone seams to be horrible at service and I wouldn´t recommend anyone in the world to buy a phone from them. Not only are Elephone lousy at service, but the software in the phone are of the same quality as of Microsoft´s, if it compiles…. ship it. I haven´t seen one firmware update in over halft a year, and people complaining in their forum are left to rot. The phone was full of config bugs, bloatware and some kind of agent that remotely kept installing even more of the bloat stuff. Terribly annoying…almost illegal in my oppinion. There where only one good thing with the stock firmware; it was rooted.
BUT! (here we go again)
Even if Elephone are one of the companys from hell, they do build good hardware. The phone was a shiny little yellow gem. And quickly became my wife´s pet.
So after spending a week washing it clean of agents and bloatware, adding swedish and a custom recovery to make backups, I handed it over to my wife.
Only one thing was I unable to fix. The proximity sensor turns the screen off at a good distance, but it comes back on again after some seconds. The buzz from the backlight is bad, and the tip of your ear keeps changing timezones, alarm settings and evetually ends the call. That leaves you with a half made call and a messed up phone…. very irritating…. Until tonight!
I found this solution after weeks of googleing and if just one more person can benefit from my findings that would make my day.
Here is how you do;
1) Go to Settings-Display-Daydream.
2) If daydream main switch is off, turn it on.
3) Touch the button “WHEN TO DAYDREAM” in the bottom and switch to “While docked” only!
4) If you like, you can switch the daydream main switch off again.
5) Make a call to test if your proximity sensor is controlling your touch and backlight.
Hopefully…yeah!
