Product test
Palm: Mini phone, maxi price, but still kind of funny
by Dominik Bärlocher
SaTrend S11: It may have a different name, but it's small and made in China
23.7.2019
Translation: machine translated
Video: Manuel Wenk
One hundred cent, three weeks delivery time. What can a Chinese phone from AliExpress do? An astonishing amount, from spyware to noise to battery.
21:40. That's the time my SaTrend S11 shows me when I start it up for the first time. I was actually expecting the "Welcome to Android" dialogue and the whole setup afterwards. As is usual with a new phone. But the manufacturer - I have no idea who exactly that is, but I'll get to that - obviously went to the trouble of setting up the phone for me. Thank you.
One of the most amusing phone tests of my career begins with a laugh at the time. Why is 21:40 so funny? Every time Apple presents a new iPhone, the press conference begins with CEO Tim Cook and co. rambling on for a while about the "best ever" at 9 o'clock. They talk for 40 minutes before the iPhone is shown for the first time. 09:40. The poor sod who set up the SaTrend manually must have got it wrong by 12 hours. It can happen with a semi-dodgy dealer.
The project from Rage
Flashback. A couple of weeks ago, I was really upset about the Palm Phone. Small is cool, but it costs 500 quid, give or take. On AliExpress there are smaller phones for a fraction of the price. So I thought I'd take a hundred in my hand and order a phone that really promises too much from the dodgiest possible dealer who is just on the verge of being credible.
One small point: AliExpress is not staffed by crooks and bandits. Most shops are cheap, very cheap in fact, but completely honest. This is because they can send large quantities directly to the customer via the portal with free shipping and without intermediaries.
My retailer is called China Good Phone Store. How can I resist that? I think we could rename ourselves "digitec: Switzerland Good Tech Store". It would certainly be good for marketing. The SaTrend S11 is advertised in the description as follows: "2G Ram 16G Rom Small 4G Mini Smartphone S11 Android 7.1 CellPhone MTK6739 WiFi Dual SIM 3.2Inch Mobile Phone GPS Bluetooth". But the picture mentions 4G. Too many Gs in the description, too much confusion in the pictures.
The product description at the bottom is even crazier. This consists largely of images. And why not.
But hey, it costs plus or minus a hundred and I get a memory card for a ridiculously small extra charge. Bought!
And it's all because the Palm gets me excited. How can something small be so much fun, but then ruin everything with the price?
The blue box
A few weeks later, I receive a rather strange-looking construction made of adhesive tape and wrapping paper in my letterbox. Inside was a blue box. I rarely talk about the packaging of phones, as it's usually a shiny pile of cardboard. The SaTrend S11 comes in a matt blue cardboard box, without a protective cover.
The text on the front, at least the bottom line, translates as "The Game is over, Innovation new". At least according to Google Translate. Aha. I interpret the rhetorical statement as "We have no more time to play. From now on, innovation rules" or something like that. All right, let's get serious. There's not much in the packaging itself. There's the phone, already set up by the manufacturer, a charging cable and the memory card, carelessly thrown into the box. The operating instructions, in Chinese, stink.
Like a bit of iPhone
Why the manufacturer has already set up the SaTrend S11 is open to speculation. Probably the most obvious is the 9:40 pm event. It quickly becomes clear that the little thing would like to be an iPhone, even if it is running Android 7.1.1. According to the system, it's the latest version of the software. It would be a bit much to expect an update service from a 100 euro China phone from a dodgy source.
So I'm assuming that someone in Shenzhen, China, has taken on the thankless job of booting up every S11, setting it up and then making it look as much like an iPhone as possible. But that's limited to the lock screen and the home screen.
The rest is Android. And spyware. By law, Chinese software manufacturers are required to collect metadata and submit it to the government. Most major manufacturers - Huawei, Oppo and others - therefore launch two software versions of their phones on the market. One Chinese version, which takes account of Chinese law, and a more open, international version. American manufacturers are doing the same thing, but the other way round. Because if you want to sell in China, you have to bow to the censorship of the local government.
I'll connect the device to my home Wi-Fi anyway. What could possibly go wrong?
The big retrofit
Since the SaTrend S11 is delivered without Google apps, either all the Google apps have to be retrofitted or the apps have to be obtained from sources other than the Google Play Store. You can therefore use APKMirror or FossHub. Or simply the Google Play Services. But an Android phone also works quite well without them. If you want to have a look at this, even if only temporarily, I can recommend it to you.
The most important app in the whole retrofit: CPU-Z. The app does nothing other than read out system data about hardware and software. Similar to Speccy for the PC. Because if China Good Phone Store doesn't know exactly what was sold to whom, and I don't know exactly who has already tampered with the phone, then I want to know exactly what's inside the little thing.
The answer is quite unspectacular. There's a Mediatek M6739 system-on-a-chip with 2GB of RAM working away. Four cores, up to 1.5GHz performance. Easy.
The manufacturer is given as "S11", as is the model. So like the Palm, which is actually called model "Palm" from the manufacturer "Palm" - i.e. Palm Palm. According to CPU-Z, the screen resolution is 480×854 pixels and the screen is 5.16 inches, i.e. 13.1 cm diagonally. This also explains why the battery lasts forever. Okay, the 3000mAh battery capacity claimed by the China Good Phone Store should also help here.
I don't think so. I believe the Mediatek and the RAM, but the rest... not so much. Because the metre says that the IPS screen measures 8.1 cm diagonally. Even the information from the China Good Phone Store, which was not that far off the mark with 3.2 inches, is correct.
The camera is a potato
The S11 S11 or SaTrend S11 is fun to use. I like my big screens, sure, but something this small has its appeal. Especially when it doesn't cost much and it works. Because that's what the S11 S11 SaTrend hastenichgesehen does. The system chugs along, will never win any prizes, but does a solid job. The speakers are surprisingly loud, even if they do rattle. So for station-hanging-and-old-nerves, it's always fine.
But the camera is bad. And I don't mean something like "I see a haze" or "The resolution is too low", no, I mean "Burn that thing with fire. It won't work anymore"-bad. A potato provided better image material. Especially the lighting errors, everything from unintentional lens flare to horrible overexposure is in there.
So. done. I've had my fun. You might soon too, because I no longer need the SaTrend S11. If you want it, here's the prize draw. I only have one of them, but you can have it for all I care. But beware: It's a China phone as it's written in the book. Funny, strange, full of spyware and cheap.
Do you want the SaTrend? Because I'm giving it away. Just click on the button below to take part.
SaTrend S11: Win the AliExpress mini phone
Click below if you want to win the SaTrend S11 in full on condition with stinkin' manual.
The competition has ended.
Journalist. Author. Hacker. A storyteller searching for boundaries, secrets and taboos – putting the world to paper. Not because I can but because I can’t not.
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