2e Performance Laughable

[benzy]

Got mine last week and set it up for my kid. All I wanted for him was a repairable phone with decent performance so he could play Minecraft and Pokemon Go. What I got was basically a brick. Performance incredibly laggy on Pokemon Go, and I had to reduce the graphics settings greatly to get Minecraft somewhat playable. Yes, I activated the setting that turns off background apps.

The phone performs no better than a Moto G5 running a Snapdragon 430 with half the RAM. I was hoping for a phone that he could use for a couple years, but what it seems I’ve ended up with is a brick of e-waste that will end up in a drawer long before then.

[Anon]

After a quick search, I can see that the MTK Helio A25 is a lot stronger than the SD430 in the CPU department, but is actually weaker in terms of graphical performance (and I’m pretty sure that the GPU is the main bottleneck when gaming on entry level devices).

It’s pretty unfortunate that it doesn’t fit your use case.

[Sharad]

We have run casual games like Candy crush, Temple of doom, etc and they run fine. Heavier games might have an issue.

One thing worth mentioning is that after the very 1st startup, phone might take few hours to update all apps and sync with your google account. That might bog the CPU down a bit for the 1st few hours.

You could try everything again maybe few hours or 1 day later and see if that makes a difference.

[Rodney_Davis]

You gotta test your phones on some real mobile games lol. Asphalt 9 played but the graphics are low. Call of Duty Mobile plays better than I thought. Played it for about an hour yesterday.

[TheLinuxBug]

Hello @benzy,

I am going to assume since you were so quick to write a scathing review you actually know how Android works and understand also how to enable developer options and how to select the graphics driver in use by each application?

I am purposely being rhetorical, because instead of asking for assistance here or asking for how things may be improved, you just jumped directly to crapping on a new product which you knew going in was an Alpha / Beta product – this is why it was promoted and supported on Indiegogo – they know there is more to be done and this is why you got to purchase what would be a $200 phone for $100 in the campaign.

That said, if you enable developer options on the phone, there is then a subsection of ‘Developer Options’ called ‘Game Driver Preferences’ and the Terracube 2e is provided with two different driver options – the default system graphics driver and then a ‘Game Driver’. I would suggest trying to change the driver for your specific games and see if this help improve performance some.

Additionally, if you haven’t already, you should check out the Duraspeed option, so you are sure that when running your games it isn’t also running a bunch of apps in the background. Google services is quite a pig of resources and when left unchecked will use a good portion of the CPU them selves for updates / notifications, using Duraspeed allows you to limit which apps will be able to run actively in the background.

Finally, you should re-set your expectations for this hardware – This isn’t being made by Motorola or Samsung and isn’t a $300.00-$500.00 phone MSRP like some of the ones you mentioned, so you should set your expectations appropriate to the hardware you are working with – it’s goal is to be cheap, easily reparable and environmentally friendly – this is also why the screen is only 720p, while those other phones you mentioned in a similar price bracket will also likely have FHD screens on them. Its a completely different product, made with different goals in mind. If you just want a cheap throw away phone for a kid to play games on, go purchase the Coolpad Brisa from Boost Mobile for $80, that is effectively a similar tier phone without all the things that make Terecube 2e unique, such as replaceable battery, repair-ability, 64GB storage, 4Gb of memory, bio-degradable case, etc.

My 2 cents.

Cheers!