Sonim XP 8 Two year review By Bryan The Cell Phone Guy

Hey guys Brian the cell phone guy here again today we're going to take a second look at the Sodom xp8. Now I've had this phone for just over two years now uh. It originally launched here in Canada back in may 2018, and this video is being shot in august 2020. So I want to give you just a brief overview for those of you who haven't seen this phone yet and then also give an update to uh people. Who've been asking questions about how this has stood up over the last two years of regular usage? Now, when this phone first launched back in may 2018, it came with android 7. , it was updated to android 8.1 in January of this year and if you buy one today, that's what you're going to get there is a scheduled update for android 10 to be done sometime in late November, perhaps December it depends on the carrier. So if you have questions on that, I would check with the specific carrier that you operate on now.

It does come with this Qualcomm snapdragon 630 64 gigs of memory, four gigs of ram, and it is expandable to 128 with a micro, SD card cameras are fairly basic, the rear is 12 megapixels and the front camera is an 8 megapixel uh. The big thing about this phone is the battery life. This thing has a 4 900 William battery uh, compared to 3500 or 3400 that you'll see in a lot of other smartphones. These days it also comes with an 18 watt, fast charger, so it will fully charge in about four hours. The most significant feature on this phone is the size, the weight, the durability and the warranty.

Now this thing is 335 grams, which is more than twice what the Samsung s10 is at.150 grams has a significantly large battery and the best thing about it is: it has a three-year warranty. Now this warranty is three years unlimited. So, no matter what you do to this phone, it is covered by warranty. So if you drive over this thing with your truck, and you flatten, it that's covered by warranty, and it also has an ip69 rating which is far superior to any other phone on the market. Most phones like the iPhone 11 and the Samsung, s10 or s20, are coming with ip68 and for a lot of people, that's good enough, but this phone is designed for the rugged user, so construction sites first responders people who are working with their phones in a very dirty uh, dangerous and rough environment.

Okay, now, let's just take a quick overview of the phone and the features on the phone itself. So what we're going to do is we're going to start off on the left hand, side of the phone, and we're going to see the power button up here at the top. This giant button here is the push to talk button and when you operate this phone on the Telus network, it works best with BS chat, and this is the volume up, and this is the volume down on the bottom of the phone. You'll see a rubberized door over the USB port on the right hand, side of the phone you're going to see the emergency button. Now this one is network dependent.

So a lot of networks don't support this. This button here is programmable, and it will uh come from the factory program to launch the camera with a double tap, but there are things that you can do to reprogram that to other functions. This is an uh, a connector for the headset jack and all the other headset pieces that you can get for the phone. This phone does not come with a standard 3.5 mil jack. If you want to use a standard headset, you have to basically buy the adapter that fits on this piece and then plug the 3.5 mil jack into that. So it does have a 5 inch OLED display, and it is extremely rugged now most reviews that you'll see on this phone and most people that you talk to they'll treat this phone and its primary features of size and weight and ruggedness as if they were something that wasn't a good thing, and they'll say this phone is nowhere near as light or as fast or has as good a camera as say the Samsung s20.

But those are all really unfair comparisons. It's its kind of like comparing a gravel truck to an economy car. It depends on what you want to do with it. If you want to go to the store and get groceries the economy, car is a much better bet. If you want to haul 12 yards of dirt, then the gravel truck is the way you should go, and you got to kind of think of this phone like that.

It's not designed to compete with the s10 or the iPhone 11 Pro it's designed to stand on its own and live in a world where ruggedness is what's most important, and this is the world of the first responders. The construction, um workers, people who are working daily in an uh in a rugged, very cold, very hot, very dirty environment and probably the most outstanding feature of this phone is the three-year unconditional warranty. Now I've had this thing for two years now, and I've treated it just as if I would treat any other phone, I'm not overly kind to it. I use it as my daily driver, and it gets put through everything that I'm going through, and I've never had a problem yet, and it is true that of the thousands of these that I have sold, I have seen a couple come back with broken screens, it's not indestructible, but the beauty of it is that, if something happens to it, you don't have to worry about it. You simply send it in for service, and it'll come back repaired at no charge and for those of you who are concerned about uh non-incendiary devices.

This is sorry. It is rated at class, 1, division 2 for non-incendiary, and basically what that means is that this thing it will not produce a heat or a spark significant to cause an explosion. Uh the way any other phone would do. That's not read this way now. The xp7, which was the forerunner to this, did have a class one division, one rating, but that's since been dropped.

Uh, probably because it was just such a small market that um it wasn't economically feasible to continue that but class one division. Two is acceptable for 95 of the industrial applications that are out there. The other thing that this phone does better than a lot of other smartphones is the push to talk capability. Now this one on the Telus network. It uses BS chat, which is a company out of California uh, but there are other um push-to-talk feature uh, sorry, programs that you can use on this phone and um that is uh unique to this phone.

If you have a Samsung or an iPhone, you can still use BS chat, but your push to talk button just becomes an icon on the screen, and you don't have near the durability that you have with this one. Now, as I say, I've been using this phone as a daily phone for the last two years, and I am very impressed with the things that it does very well. The sound quality the camera is more than adequate for the features that I need. The durability is more than I could ask for, and basically it's just. It's hung in their very well as a phone for the last two years and I wouldn't hesitate to uh to buy it again and if you're thinking about getting a phone- and you have a rugged environment that you work or live or play in this is definitely the phone for you now.

There are other rugged phones on the market and, depending on your carrier, that'll determine which ones you have access to. But if you have access to the sonum xp8, I would highly recommend this phone as a daily driver for anybody who is in a rugged or a harsh environment. That's all I got for now, thanks for watching.

Source : Bryan The Cell Phone Guy