Before actually getting my hands on the Goophone i5C I knew that it was designed to look like an iPhone 5C but I didn’t realize just how much the Goophone tries to mimic Apple’s colorful smartphone. The supplier I used sent me a model which included a very real looking iPhone 5C box with an Apple like instruction leaflet. The device itself even includes an Apple logo on the back! There are of course legal ramifications to Goophone’s blatant copying but that is not my department! What I can tell you is what the phone is like to use.
Just like its Apple counterpart the Goophone i5C features a 4 inch display but with a resolution of 480 x 854 (compared to 1136 x 640 for the real thing). It comes with a dual-core 1.2 GHz MediaTek MTK6572 that includes a Mali-400 MP GPU, 512 MB of memory, 8GB of internal storage and a 8 MP camera. As for the price, you can probably pick one up for around $120 plus postage and taxes.
At the heart of the i5C is the MediaTek MTK6572, a dual-core A7 processor designed for low-end 3G devices. Cortex-A7 cores are becoming increasingly popular, especially for chip makers like MediaTek and Rockchip, and they have basically replaced the Cortex-A9 cores at the bottom of the market. Here are the full specs of the Goophone i5C:
- 4 inch, 480×854 pixels display
- MTK6572 Dual Core 1.2Ghz CPU with Mali-400 MP GPU
- Android 4.2.2
- 2G: GSM 850/900/1800/1900MHz
- 3G: WCDMA 2100/850MHz
- 512 MB RAM
- 8 GB of internal storage
- 8 MP rear facing camera
- 1.2 MP front facing camera
- GPS
- Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n
- Bluetooth 2.0
- 1500 mAh battery
- Weight 132g
The phone only comes with 8GB of internal storage that is divided into 2GB phone storage and 6GB external storage. This can be a problem for larger apps or games as they simply won’t fit into the 2GB of phone storage. It is apparently possible to install a microSD card but you need to undo some screws and take off the back. The card slot is only accessible under the internal battery.
The display itself is reasonable considering its very low (by 2013/2014 standards) resolution. It isn’t clear from the specifications if it is an IPS display, however the good viewing angle would seem to imply that it is. Also the color reproduction is quite good for such a budget device.
The phone chargers via a USB cable, but unlike most Android smartphones there isn’t a micro USB port at the phone end, but rather something that looks suspiciously like a Lighting adapter. I don’t have any Apple devices that use a Lightning adapter so I can’t confirm the compatibility but it certainly looks like one, even if it actually isn’t!
Although the phone runs Android 4.2.2 Jelly Bean and includes Google Play, the launcher has been heavily modified to look like iOS. This isn’t simply a case of a standard replacement launcher with an iOS skin, the launcher has been tampered with to make it look and feel like iOS. There is no App Draw button, no navigation bar and no soft buttons. The physical round button at the bottom of the device acts as a “Back” button and not as a “Home” button as you might expect. This means that once you are in an app the only way out of it is to keep pressing back until the app exits and takes you to the home screen.
This can be very annoying especially when you have gone deep into an app. There are two workarounds for this. First the phone comes with the EasyTouch app installed by default. This app puts a dot on the screen that functions in a similar way to Apple’s AssistiveTouch feature. If you press the dot you get access to a number of commands including a “Home” button. The other way is to double click the hardware button to access the task manager. From here tapping on the background takes you back to the home screen.
Another app that comes pre-installed is an iOS control-center clone. By swiping up from the bottom of the screen you get access to the control-center which allows you to change the screen brightness, enable airplane mode, change the volume, use the flash as a torch and so on. Oddly enough swiping from the top of the screen reveals the standard Android 4.2 notification area where you can also change the screen brightness and enable airplane mode etc.
Although the default GUI looks like iOS when you install other apps their icons look out of place and often the transparency around the icons don’t work. This means that you get odd colors around icons for apps installed from Google Play. Also there was a few times when the colors clashed between dialog boxes and the current color scheme. This meant that you could get a dialog with dark text on a dark background.
Examples of a bad GUI – Left: Icon color clashes. Right: Dark text on a dark background.
Yet another problem with the default launcher is that you can’t install any widgets… which I guess is just like iOS!!!
The settings app has also be re-written to look like the settings app in iOS. This means that it can be a bit hard to find things, especially if you are used to stock Android. One odd omission seems to be a way to set the screen timeout. I must have searched the settings three or four times but I couldn’t find where to change the timeout. In the end I installed a third party app which allowed me to do it!
The device supports Google Play and although hardly any of the official Google apps like Gmail and YouTube etc are pre-loaded, it is possible to install then from Google Play. Talking of Google Play, it isn’t installed as Google Play, instead it hides under the “App Store” icon which looks like Apple’s icon for its iTunes App Store but in fact it starts the Play Store!
In terms of compatibility most apps installed without any problems, however Epic Citadel crashes when run and big games like Asphalt 8: Airborne won’t install as the internal memory is partitioned in such a way that there isn’t space for the download! However smaller games like CSR Racing installed and worked without any problems as did classics like Angry Birds and Temple Run 2. To uninstall an app you need to long press on its icon until all the icons start wiggling and then press the X at the corner of the icon. This will then trigger the normal Android uninstall process.
It is possible to get a more Android like experience by installing an alternative launcher however I couldn’t find a way to get the soft keys back which means you need to rely on the EasyTouch app or the task manger for navigation even when using an Android launcher.