Any experience with Chinese octacore phones?

[Iron Mew]

I'm hunting for a six-inch phablet at an affordable price, and I came across the THL T200/T200C (I think the only difference between them is the internal storage). It's an octacore with 2 gigs of RAM running Android 4.2 on a MTK6592W chip. DX have it for $270 shipped, approximately the equivalent of 200 euro, when the cheapest branded phablet I can find that's actually worth buying is the Huawei Mate, and that costs sixty euro more and has significantly lower-specced hardware.

I'm aware of the risks of buying off-brand phones, but that doesn't mean I shouldn't try to reduce them however possible, so I'm looking for anyone with experience with the T200whatever or in general other octacore phones (which all seem off-brand so far; I can't see any branded ones on sale).

Are octacore processors actually faster? By which I mean, do the OS and apps know what to do with the additional four cores, or is it one of those features added just to increase a number?

If you have one or have used such a phone, can you share your general opinion?

 

[ljxdaly]

fwiw, i got an HDC S4 clone awhile back. NONE of the specs as advertised were valid. not one. so i caution you that your "being aware of the risks" goes beyond quality control. it goes to truth in advertising as well.

 

[Iron Mew]

I wouldn't buy it from eBay, I'd buy it from DX. They've always been good with the specs (batteries excluded, but nobody's ever good with those).

 

[ksean007]

I have the THL T200 HD Version not the c version which is not full HD but 720P great phone and by far worth every penny picked mine up from THLmobilestore and very satisfied, just going on what was said about it being 8 cores yes you can feel the speed of this phone it's never sluggish except if using a questionable 3rd party launcher but other than that , its a beauty to behold and for the money a great bargain, also love the fact it accepts 64gig SD cards too.

full HD YouTube and games are breath taking on this Phone, I purchased mine for £183 from China shipped to the UK and the equivalent galaxy note 3 I could buy 3 of my phones for the price of 1 Galaxy so not really much else to say but what a deal

 

[NiceSquares Studio]

With this devices do you need to unlock them in some ways to use in europe or are they ready to go?

 

[barth2]

Are octacore processors actually faster? By which I mean, do the OS and apps know what to do with the additional four cores, or is it one of those features added just to increase a number?

If you have one or have used such a phone, can you share your general opinion?

Yeah I wonder about this too. I have a hexcore on my desktop and most the time four or five cores are idle. It's not like you're going to be doing video transcoding on your phone. Benchmark numbers will look great because benchmark apps know how to use all cores. But real performance?