now I initially read the name of this product as
mao1 but fortunately that wasn't right
it's the mobile internet audio device 01 from moondrop and has absolutely nothing
to do with assisted suicide this is
rather the first mobile phone from
moondrop who is best known for their chaii audio products and more recently
keyboards and wow it's not particularly
heavy and boy it's got like a camera
camera a camera like hanger hook almost
that is really something I think I see what they were going for it's kind of
like those first generation OLED TVs where they had the super super thin
advertised specs but then they just had like a giant Caboose at the bottom oh
it's really not that comfortable to hold though look at that profile it's like
sharp in the spots that you hold it where it's thin I feel like I'm coming
across really negative we're going to take a closer look at this in a minute
first what else have we got in here ooh accessories 3ft braided charging cable
and that's it God it's amazing what crap
qualifies as accessories these days
charging cable that's not an accessory that's the bare minimum let's do a quick
physical tour we've got a 64 megapixel main camera 8 megapixel wide camera and
a 32 megapixel selfie camera that Moon
drop themselves describes as it's not
good but it works is that serious they
actually said that okay on the left we've got a whole lot of nothing on the
bottom we've got our micro SD slot yeah
we've got a USB charging port that does support USB 3 5 GB per second speeds and
fast charging in fact we managed to get to a 36% charge in just 15 minutes and a
full charge in just a hair over an hour
on the right we've got our lock button volume rocker where is my fingerprint
sensor oh it's UND screen well hope hope
it's a good one JK it's kind of mid it
works about 80% of the time first try
none of which is probably compelling you guys to drop everything and order this
phone but worry not for I have something to show you on the top we've got a
regular 3 and2 mm audio jack and what's this a 4.4 mm balanced audio jack that's
right my friends true to their Heritage moondrop has focused this device on
being well a phone yes but also
recognizing that most people are not going to carry around an additional MP3
player on top of their phone an excellent MP3 player if only I could get
it to turn on right now is this thing charged well looks like someone might
have turned this on before they put it in the box after lab testing so while we
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96% why was this refusing to turn on that's so weird what is up with this
wall wallpaper why is there a school child on my phone look I try not to be
judgy about this stuff but like what the
that is a child kind of an interesting skin the phone's running Android 13
before we poke at that too much though I want to talk about the material that the
shell is made of here it's
p we think they mean polycarbonate but we have no way of
knowing for sure okay cool so the screen
one of the highlights and also low light of the device it's 2460 x 1080 in
resolution it's OLED it'll run at either 60 or 120 HZ or it'll auto switch
between the two and it was pretty accurate out of the box right yes uses
highfrequency dimming to avoid any Flicker and unfortunately that's about
all that I can say about it it only hit
460 nits in SDR and that's even with
auto brightness enabled which on many other phones allows the display to boost
making it more usable outside and in HDR man we got some weird Behavior to the
point where we couldn't even really measure the accuracy properly because we
couldn't trust our results watch this on YouTube I'm going to fire up an HDR
video here
what that is not even close and this is
a phone from 6 years ago now obviously
this Hardware is better so whatever's going on here has to be in the software
what is this color maybe the audio experience is so good that I won't care
how my HDR video
looks nope of course Moon drop never
said that the speakers were particularly good why don't we actually plug in a
pair of headphones look I got to be honest with you I've never been able to
tell the difference between a balanced output and a regular output did anyone
else notice that this thing went from 90% battery to 42% while I've been
sitting here it just dropped to 41 it
just shut down I think there's something wrong with it okay well that's good to
know because when we did our battery endurance test we only got what was it
about 12 hours out of this thing which is very low compared to other devices so
obviously it's lasting a lot less than 12 hours right now but it could be that
it was in the middle of experiencing some kind of failure unfortunately our
collaborators headphones.com were busy and we weren't able to get this tested
by them maybe they'll test it in the future though we'd be happy to send this over to them in the meantime the lab's
initial impressions of the deck are that it's about on par with a desktop deck
that you could get in the 50 to $100 range but I haven't heard it for myself
yet so all it remains is for me to listen to some music by default because
this is like a Chinese Android 13 install none of the Google Play store or
Google Play Services things were installed so we had to S load everything
including Basics like Spotify onto this phone in order to get it to do anything
so if you are in a Google region um just
something that you might want to be aware of now we did manage to get 5G
connectivity working but we don't have a full list of bands from Moon drop yet if
we get it by the time we publish this video we're going to put it up on screen right now but in the meantime Gary has
hacks sored it so I should be able to just install whatever I want I'm going
to go with apple music this is a this is a audio file phone from the year 2024
this is not a motherboard from 1998 why am I hearing interactions with
the screen through my headphones watch watch watch watch watch watch watch
watch huh you hear it so when I press
the first one and then the second one
here's what I think though okay one of the major selling points of this phone
is that they are bypassing the Android audio subsystem so it's possible that
whatever it is they're doing in order to do that involves like like some some
switching time and so the first time that it needs to make a noise it might
get a little confus mulated it's not a
gamebreaking problem but it's irritating
the good news is that it's not what I thought it's not just you know
electronic noise being passed through to the headphone jack like we used to see
on Old motherboards okay I'm sorry I swear I'm going to actually listen to
this thing at some point all right guys give me give me something to listen
to God airpods suck you know like they
really do suck don't they why do I accept it was this really that bad you
know the issue for me isn't even the wire the issue for me is not wanting to
carry around the USBC to 3 and 1 half mm dongle and not being willing to
compromise on the phone that has the 3 and 1 12 mm Jack because this sounds
great compared to what you're probably carrying around in your pocket right now
but this phone really sucks I wish I could say that the price makes up for it
or that it has it's a Flagship killer it's got a super high-end s so or
whatever but it doesn't it's got a mediatech chipset that's about
equivalent to a Snapdragon 6 gen 1 and
it's coming in at $400 which yeah is
more of a budget oriented phone price especially when you consider that as a
feat your phone it has something to kind of compel you to at least consider it
but when you compare that to something like the nothing phone 2A for $50 less
than this that's tough to recommend buy a
nothing phone 2A and buy a nice USBC Dack yeah I'm getting the nod from Gary
from the lab with that said we haven't tried the 4.4mm balanced output yet
although I have to confess whether it's because I'm Tin eared or not trained
enough I have yet on the same DAC and headphone combination to notice a big
difference going from a regular output to a balanced output I'm sorry I
uh I just can't imagine myself needing
my phone to drive these like if I'm if I'm wearing something that comes off my
head that easily when I'm moving I'm stationary
boys obviously this is apples to oranges
but if you went the full moon drop setup you'd be having a pretty good time
when you're listening to music and a pretty rotten time the rest of the time
gaming it falls behind the nothing phone 2A um not by a 10 you can play genin
impact on low 60 FPS or low plus rather it's competitive with that phone RAM and
storage wise though it has 12 gigs of lpddr 4X oh
4X o 256 gigs of uh ufs 3.1 storage
and I guess now's the time for us to look at the cameras that even Moon drop
wasn't willing to talk up by the way I think this charging indicator kind of
confirms my hypothesis that it was just a battery calibration issue that it got
a little bit confused about so our
battery tests may be accurate in spite
of the 5,000 mAh battery the battery life on this thing is not great let's go
ahead and fire up the camera wow this is the worst camera I have seen in years my
friends and like I'm not talking that it's low resolution or whatever sure
yeah 64 megapixel sensor so there's some sharpness there but then they took that
sharpness and they added a sharpening filter to it and then they added a
second sharpening filter to it and then they boosted the Vibrance look at this
green next to this green that's supposed to be the same
green what are you even talking about so
let's put it this way I'm always happy to see new entrance in the market and
I'm always happy to see companies that are trying to differentiate their
product in a meaningful way and having a decent onboard deck on a phone is
something I think a lot of people are asking for and the audio experience
itself the isolation from the Android audio subsystem that stuff is a really
good start but it's clear that they still have some work to do with respect
to the ergonomics and with respect to the software experience and building a
more rounded experience because on the one hand you guys have a compelling
sales pitch here this is the one device that you have to carry in order to
combine your phone functions and your mp3 player functions and you've got this
side going pretty good but if I had one of these I'd probably still feel like I
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