ThL W8s – Initial Impressions

I saw what appeared to be a cracking deal on a decent spec’d smartphone whilst surfing the web a couple of weeks ago, took the plunge and ordered directly from China.
I’d never seen or heard of the brand-name ThL or the W8s phone before and to be honest I’m not too sure what inspired me to dive in but I did and 12 days from the day of the order a package arrived. Saturday 7th, just this weekend in fact.
I’ve spent the weekend setting up the device to use as my daily driver and will be posting much more details once I’ve had time with the device.

Immediate feelings:

Good

Feels very lightAmazing screenTwo sim slotsSd card slot

Bad

Comes with Chinese charger (although they added in a uk adaptor)Is running Android 4.2.1, not the more recent 4.3

Not certain which of the above two categories to list these points under yet

Ok so lets get this out of the way at the start; the W8s looks extremely similar to the Samsung Galaxy S4Overtly housed in quite shiny plastic therefore doesn’t feel as good as devices made with more  premium materialsTwo batteriesTo access the sim slots/sd slot you have to remove the entire back casing of the phoneAlthough it has a big in-built storage allowance it seems to be partitioned in a way which leaves a small part for apps

Hardware

Display – 5.0”, 1920 x 1080 pixels, 5 point multi-touch, Corning Gorillas Glass 3
CPU – MTK6589T Cortex-A7 Quad-core ARMv7, 1.5GHz
GPU – PowerVR SGX 544
O/S – Android 4.2.1
RAM – 2GB
ROM – 32GB
Wi-Fi – 802.11 b/g/n
Band – 2G: GSM 850/900/1800/1900MHz / 3G: WCDMA 850/2100MHz
MicroSD up to 32GB
Dual SIM
Front Camera – 5.0M HD
Back Camera – 13.0M HD AF color with flashlight and auto focus
Battery – 2 x 2000mAh Battery
Net Weight(Including battery) – 154g
Size – 178 x 50 x 60 mm / 7.0 x 1.96 x 2.36 inch
3.5mm audio and mic jack
Extras – 3.5” earphone, 5.0V adapter, USB cable, screen cover case, screen protector

If you have any questions or tests you want me to run leave it in the comments section below and I’ll include the answers in my follow-up review.