Impressions: Smartisan Pro

I was thinking about buying a phone to play games on lately. I’d been using a Xiaomi Mi Pad 4, and it’s not like it can’t run games, but that screen aspect ratio cuts off part of my view. When I play a turret-type mid-lane mage I just can’t keep track of everything, so I figured maybe I should just get a phone.

At first I had my sights set on the Xiaomi Mi Max (first gen), since its specs are good enough, the screen is big enough, and the battery is ridiculous—it’s basically a handheld console. The second and third generations don’t even bear mentioning; the performance actually went backwards, even with bigger batteries and better build quality.

But the Mi Max is obviously not something you can buy new. I found only eBay had them, so I went looking, and after digging around I couldn’t find a single one I was happy with. Ones in good condition were priced absurdly, and the reasonably priced ones were all crippled units. Then I thought I’d check out LeEco phones or Gree phones—hah, Gree phones are even more expensive, and LeEco phones are complete garbage…

While I was hesitating, my good buddy, the Guo Degang of the medical world, a.k.a. Duan Ye, answered my prayers:

“Master Li, there’s a Smartisan Nut Pro here that Luo Yonghao sold to idiots. Wanna take a look?” “If it’s sold to idiots, then how do you have one, Duan Ye? Don’t tell me…” “Cut the crap. Do you want it or not?” “Yes yes yes…”

So I took the Nut Pro off Duan Ye’s hands and began my testing journey.

After getting my hands on it I felt a bit disappointed—this wasn’t the machine I wanted. Why? Because the CPU is a Snapdragon 625. It’s not that the 625 absolutely can’t game; I’d optimized a Lenovo P8 before to run Honor of Kings and PUBG, it’s just… still painful, isn’t it?

Actually I’d assumed the Nut Pro Duan Ye mentioned was probably the Nut Pro 2, the Snapdragon 660 one that recently got unlockable bootloaders and MoKee ROMs online. Turns out no… so it looks like ROM flashing on this thing is basically hopeless.

After getting the Nut Pro in hand I found the system was still Smartisan OS 4.X. Duan Ye said this phone had been gathering dust for a long time, and he clearly wasn’t lying. After checking, it turned out it could upgrade to the latest Smartisan 6.0, and I immediately felt proud, thinking our Luo really is a master of sentimentality, pushing the latest version to such an old machine. Would it get TNT and that Infinite Screen too?

Turns out I was overthinking it. Nothing there, just bug fixes and a few trivial little features.

The phone is really uncomfortable to hold, digging into your hand, but I don’t care—who do I have to thank for that but my faith in Sony? The build quality is actually okay, the screen colors are nice, the buttons feel solid, no signs of bending, and the whole thing’s unorthodox look actually makes it kind of good-looking…

By the way, is looking good the only thing Smartisan phones have left going for them?

I had actually used Smartisan’s system before, for about 2 hours, and then I returned the phone. But that was many years ago, and now with the latest version in hand, I feel it’s improved quite a bit. First, it doesn’t lag anymore, and then there are more little details that make you feel they put thought into it. Of course, Teacher Luo has bragged about these details enough already, so I won’t go on about them.

The only things I think Smartisan does well are Flash Capsule, “One Step,” and “Big Bang.”

Flash Capsule is a genuinely practical feature. The voice recognition rate is high and it’s very efficient—perfect for someone like me who constantly gets ideas for stories but can’t write them down right away. If I owned a Smartisan, I bet those ideas I forgot wouldn’t have miscarried.

“One Step” I find pretty meh. It’s basically Android’s standard Share, just optimized and tweaked for certain domestic apps. And for someone like me who doesn’t use domestic bloatware much—hell, even my Weibo client is Share—this feature is useless. Plus it crashes very easily… really, of the 10 times this phone froze, at least 9 were from waking up this stupid “One Step.”

“Big Bang” is a more useful thing. To this day no third-party app has perfectly replicated it; they’re all just workarounds. And the coolest part of Big Bang is you can fix characters with your voice. Say you typed a character wrong—“sky” (天空) became “fill in the blank” (填空)—you can select “sky” (天) and say “the tian in blue sky” (蓝天的天), and the character gets corrected back. But this operation always feels familiar, exactly like Master Luo’s TNT voice controls… Still, fixing small characters on a phone is fine, but using it for office work is a bit dumb.

One more thing: Smartisan supports global word lookup, which excited me, because I’d been looking for a built-in dictionary feature on phones for ages. Turns out it’s just a partnership with Youdao Dictionary, and it only supports English, not Japanese…

Last is the phone’s gaming performance. I only play Honor of Kings. Can it run it? The answer is definitely yes. Turn effects to low, crank high frame rate and multithreading, and it barely runs—sometimes even hits 45 FPS. It just always feels like something’s missing; probably still far from “smooth.” After gaming for a bit it heats up noticeably, and that heat is really hot, not warm. Overall I wouldn’t recommend gaming on this thing.

Since I don’t recommend gaming on it, and this thing can’t be flashed with custom ROMs, I could only return the phone to Duan Ye the Smartisan fan.

After using it for a while, I’ve formed some impressions of this Nut Pro. Briefly:

1. Specs are good enough—except for gaming.
2. Build quality is good, but not excellent; just acceptable.
3. The system has many highlights, and quite a few are exclusive to the phone. Maybe Smartisan wants to imitate Apple, making the system better so users stay for the software? But it’s not enough yet!
4. It looks good. The feel isn’t great but it looks good—isn’t looking good enough?
5. Battery life is average. I feel Smartisan’s system isn’t aggressive about killing processes, can’t control a lot of bloatware, and in the end it just fizzles out, leaving battery life stuck in that so-so state.

All in all this phone isn’t as bad as the internet says; it’s acceptable. But apparently the Nut Pro 2 has more problems—water getting into the screen, bending after half a year. Those fatal hardware flaws actually highlight some of the Nut Pro 1’s strengths. But no matter how you put it, the Nut Pro 2 at least has a Snapdragon 660, keeps dropping in price, and can run MoKee stock Android—even as a toy it’s more fun than the first gen…

Of course in the end I went back to my goal of finding a “gaming phone.” I hesitated for a long time and still didn’t buy the Nut Pro 2, but instead bought another more “真香” (so good it shuts you up) phone. I’ll talk about it next time.