Mlais M4 Note review: Galaxy Note 4 for less

I ran an Antutu benchmark test on the phone, and unsurprisingly, it did not score higher than anything major. As you can see in the screenshots, it’s about an average phone that can be situated in the mid-range category based on the score. But benchmarks aren’t all there is to a smartphone, and the Mlais M4 Note demonstrates that perfectly in real life usage.

The Mlais M4 Note was my daily driver for a week and I pound on it. I usually get excited about new phones and the fact that this looked so good, felt so good and was so cheap intrigued me, so I tried a ton of things on it. First off, the entire user interface is smooth as butter. I experienced absolutely no sluggishness in the animations of Lollipop, no sluggishness when pulling up Google Now, and absolutely no stutter with social apps.

Youtube is my go-to video player and I use it for news, entertainment and music, so I consider myself a pretty heavy video watcher. The Mlais M4 Note handled all quality videos well, without any frames getting lost and without the UI going crazy. It was just as smooth and silky as a Nexus 5 or even a Nexus 6 would be on stock Android.

Gaming was great on the phone, Asphalt 8, Marvel Future Fight and a ton of other intensive and less-intensive games ran smoothly. What impressed me when it comes to gaming is that the phone didn’t overheat. It did overheat, however, when using the camera or when installing a lot of apps on it. But otherwise, the Mlais M4 Note remained at a comfortably cool temperature.

There has to be a fault with this phone, I thought to myself, and I suspected that it would be the battery life after seeing that the UI behaved very well and the phone could handle anything I threw at it. It wasn’t the battery life. I was surprised that after running Antutu benchmarks, playing Asphalt 8 for an hour, playing Marvel Future Fight for 30 minutes, catching up on Youtube subscriptions for 2 hours, browsing and posting on Instagram for an hour, checking Facebook, messaging and using the camera extensively, I still had more than half of the battery left.

Now this was all done on Wi-Fi and there were no calls involved. Although the Mlais M4 Note is a smartphone with 4G LTE, I didn’t get a chance to try that feature out. So I can’t honestly speak of battery life when usage involves calls and 4G LTE. But with Wi-Fi, the Mlais M4 Note battery life is very impressive. I could use this phone for two days and still have charge left when I would go to bed. In my book, that’s rather impressive for a Chinese smartphone.

Then I found the fault with this beast. The Mlais M4 Note camera, although beefy, has a few issues. The good things about the camera: flash photography is ok, there are tons of modes and features to use and I especially liked the 3D photo feature, the selfie camera and the beauty mode are effective and high-quality and the camera is very fast and responsive. The bad: overexposure. This was truly annoying. As soon as I tried taking a photo which contained at least a bit of sunlight, exposure would go crazy. White backgrounds everywhere, overexposed subjects and just plain bad photos. At the same time, another thing that the Mlais M4 Note camera fails at is capturing motion.