Mlais M4 Note review: Galaxy Note 4 for less

Heading towards speakers, there’s one lone speaker on the bottom part of the back panel. It’s not great. It’s decent, but it’s not great. The Mlais M4 Note is not an HTC device, so don’t expect that quality of sound. The speakers are pretty silent, compared to other phones. It can’t compete against current flagships, but it can’t compete against current mid-rangers either. Luckily, I’m a headphone type of girl, and with headphones, I actually felt like the sound quality was better than on my previous daily driver, the LG G3. But that depends a lot on headphones, too. Fyi, I used a generic pear of over-ear Gumdrop headsets and they worked marvelously with the Mlais M4 Note.

Now for the part that I didn’t like about the Mlais M4 Note that much: camera. The device has a 13 MP shooter on the rear with a flash and a 8 MP with 88% Wide-angle camera on the front. There’s a bit of a mystery here, on my part. The specs of the phone online say that the Mlais M4 Note camera on the front is an 8 MP shooter, but when you end up in the camera settings and choose your image sizes, it’s only a 5 MP shooter. A bit odd. But the selfie camera is very good, I loved the experience. The beauty mode that you could use was great, it just airbrushed my face a bit and made my eyes bigger.

The rear camera on the Mlais M4 Note is a 13 MP shooter and it performs accordingly. To be honest, it performs in an average manner. Let me put it this way: 60 % of the photos I took were good, 40 % were botched completely, so it’s a hit or miss situation with the camera. In low light conditions, it performed decently, but not too well. The photos did end up being grainy and messy, but with flash, it was quite ok. In bright environments, it overexposed a lot. I played around with settings and did manage to get good shots in well-lighted places with sunlight all over the scenery, but I did have to fiddle a lot.

Capturing moving objects is not fun either. Most of the time, the subjects of my photos ended up with blurry tails and faces and I’m talking about cats here, yes. Otherwise, face tracking was ok, autofocus was exemplary, close-up photography is absolutely great and if you set the modes right and prepare your shot a minute before, you’re going to get good photos. One big plus for the camera, though: it’s fast. And I mean really fast. It takes virtually nothing for it to process the images, unless you’re doing a 3D photo or a panorama.

Since we’re on the topic of 3D photos, here’s what I learned. The Mlais M4 Note saves the 3D photos in .MPO format and makes each photo up out of 25 individual shots. And they’re awesome. I can’t view them on my PC as I would need I don’t know what kind of software, but having them in my gallery is very fun. I managed to take a shot of my boyfriend doing the crazy-head-butt-mental=institution-horror-movie-ghost move and it came out eerily good. I hope that you know what I’m trying to say: you know those horror flicks that happen in asylums and there’s suddenly that shot of a mentally ill girl in the corner whose head seems to be whirring with odd faces on it? That’s what I got with the Mlais M4 Note using the 3D camera feature. It’s not its purpose, but it does it perfectly anyhow.