A few years ago, Xiaomi entered the smartphone market with the slogan “Born for Enthusiasts,” prompting numerous manufacturers to follow suit, thus initiating a rapid development model for the domestic smartphone industry. At that time, the price point of “1999 yuan” was a common perception among consumers regarding smartphones. However, with the emergence of a series of budget brands like Redmi and Meizu, a price war among domestic manufacturers was imminent, leading to an increasing number of smartphones priced around a thousand yuan.
However, the thousand yuan price point is not the “end point” for smartphones. As the industry matures, the cost of smartphone components has decreased significantly, and many manufacturers have contributed to the emergence of affordable smartphones priced around a hundred yuan. Among these are internet-focused brands like Xiaomi, Meizu, and Honor, as well as manufacturers like Red Pepper, which closely collaborate with carriers. Today’s review focuses on a product related to this.
Entering 2016, it is evident that Red Pepper has become more aggressive strategically, not only strengthening and increasing the frequency of its collaborations with carriers but also frequently launching multiple affordable and well-experienced products in the smartphone market. Many of you may still remember the Red Pepper National Monkey Sai Lei launched a few months ago, which prominently featured VoLTE HD voice and showcased sufficient appeal at a price of 399 yuan. Now, its successor, the Red Pepper New National Monkey Sai Lei (GM-T5), has made its debut. How does it perform in practice?
Due to its very affordable price, I do not wish to compare the Red Pepper New National Monkey Sai Lei with mainstream brands like Redmi or Meizu, as there will inevitably be compromises.
In terms of appearance, having become accustomed to metal and glass materials, I found the Red Pepper New National Monkey Sai Lei to have a refreshing feel at first glance. The plastic material has advantages over metal and glass, such as strong plasticity, lightweight durability, and lower production costs. On this phone, a single piece of plastic creates a clean and tidy visual impression, especially in terms of overall integrity, which is stronger than those three-segment metal bodies. Overall, it looks quite good, doesn’t it?
Front View
Back View
Upon closer inspection of the top part of the phone, it still gives a very clean impression, but there are no light sensors or proximity sensors. Could they be hidden? Opening the quick settings panel, I found that the screen brightness adjustment button indeed does not have an automatic option, but fortunately, it can be manually adjusted freely.
The ID borderless design, although criticized by many users, still does not hinder its popularity. The Red Pepper New National Monkey Sai Lei also adopts this design, providing a good visual experience when the screen is off. However, when using a light-colored background with a dot matrix screen, a relatively wide black border may be revealed, but this does not significantly affect operation.
No Light Sensor
Black Border Appears Not Wide
The high plasticity of the plastic material allows the body to present different textures and tactile sensations. The Red Pepper New National Monkey Sai Lei incorporates a diamond pattern on the back cover, which not only breaks the monotony of the visual experience but also increases the friction between the phone and the palm. Coupled with the slightly curved back cover, I find the hand feel quite good, without any sense of cheapness.
Diamond Pattern
Side View
Another advantage of plastic is that it allows for an easily removable back cover. For many entry-level users, a removable design is what they are most familiar with. Therefore, the removable back cover of the Red Pepper New National Monkey Sai Lei reduces the transition cost for users to a certain extent. Additionally, the battery is also removable, with a capacity of 2000mAh. Although the Red Pepper New National Monkey Sai Lei has a body size of only 5 inches, this number still seems a bit conservative. Based on my daily usage, the battery life of this device can only be considered average.
Removable Back Cover
2000mAh Battery
In terms of appearance, the simple and smooth design and appropriately textured coverage reflect the advantages of plastic as a body material. It seems that the Red Pepper New National Monkey Sai Lei does not lag behind due to its plastic body. So how is the basic experience?
First, it is necessary to understand the configuration of this device. The Red Pepper New National Monkey Sai Lei is equipped with a Spreadtrum SC9830 processor, with a clock speed of 1.5GHz. The standard version comes with a memory combination of 1GB RAM + 8GB ROM (the high configuration version doubles this), and supports a maximum storage expansion of 32GB. In terms of photography, the device features a 5-megapixel rear camera and a 2-megapixel front camera. Overall, the configuration of the Red Pepper New National Monkey Sai Lei meets its positioning, and on paper, it is sufficient for general daily use.
Performance: Playing a Small Game is No Problem
The Spreadtrum SC9830 chip equipped in the Red Pepper New National Monkey Sai Lei may not be well-known to many, so let me briefly introduce it: this chip is built using a 28nm process technology, consisting of 4 Cortex-A7 cores clocked at 1.5GHz, with a dual-core Mali-T400 MP2 GPU. It supports five network standards: TD-LTE, FDD LTE, TD-SCDMA, WCDMA, and GSM. Most importantly, it supports VoLTE HD voice technology. Overall, the Spreadtrum SC9830 is not a performance-oriented chip; its advantage lies in power consumption.
Although the performance configuration of the Red Pepper New National Monkey Sai Lei is not outstanding, it is still necessary to have an intuitive understanding of its performance. According to AnTuTu’s benchmark scores, the Red Pepper New National Monkey Sai Lei scores nearly 25,000 points. Don’t expect to play large games, but it can handle daily chatting, browsing Weibo, watching videos, and some small games without any issues.
AnTuTu Benchmark Scores
The device I have is the standard version, so it only has 1GB of RAM, and under the system’s usage, only 4.7GB of storage is available. With no background applications running, the RAM usage of the Red Pepper New National Monkey Sai Lei is at 41%. After opening five applications, including Weibo, WeChat, and the photo gallery, the RAM usage rises to 56%, so there are not many stuttering issues in system operation.
Memory Usage
Photography: Enough to Record Life
The Red Pepper New National Monkey Sai Lei features a camera combination of a 2-megapixel front camera and a 5-megapixel rear camera. These parameters seem a bit “meager,” but for the target users of this device, it is sufficient as long as it can conveniently record life; delving into the photography quality does not hold much significance.
From the camera interface, it can be seen that the Red Pepper New National Monkey Sai Lei supports beauty (makeup) photography, panoramic photography, and scanning photography, as well as a manual mode.
Camera Interface
From the sample photos, the Red Pepper New National Monkey Sai Lei performs fairly average in long-range and mid-range imaging, with the biggest drawback being insufficient resolution, as the outlines and edges of plant leaves cannot be well represented. Additionally, overexposure and purple fringing phenomena also occur.
Long-Range Sample
Mid-Range Sample
However, it performs much better in close-up shots, with significant improvements in color representation and resolution, especially in the last flower sample, which visually competes with mainstream thousand-yuan machines.
Close-Up Sample
Close-Up Sample
In terms of selfies, the Red Pepper New National Monkey Sai Lei supports both “beauty camera” and “makeup camera”. In the images below, the left shows a sample taken with the medium beauty mode, where the big-eye effect is somewhat exaggerated, but the overall performance is acceptable. The right image was taken with the makeup camera, where users can use virtual lipstick, blush, contact lenses, and eyeshadow for “decoration.” Although the clarity is lacking, the playability is quite high.
Beauty and Makeup
System: Practical and Stable Approach
Like other Red Pepper phones, the Red Pepper New National Monkey Sai Lei runs on YunOS, which consistently features practicality and stability. Users can log into the system quickly using their Taobao or Alipay accounts, and once logged in, they can enjoy powerful cloud services. This feature supports multiple information backups, including contacts, messages, albums, notes, and applications, with over 1TB of cloud storage capacity, which is quite ample and very convenient in actual use, allowing for easy data transfer even when switching to another Red Pepper phone.
Cloud Services
Due to the relationship between the carrier and YunOS (YunOS is a smart operating system under Alibaba Group), the Red Pepper New National Monkey Sai Lei comes pre-installed with many related applications, which may occupy some of the device’s storage. However, these applications can be freely uninstalled.
Many Pre-installed Applications
It is worth mentioning that the Red Pepper New National Monkey Sai Lei also supports dual application functionality. Before using it, users need to download the dual application assistant (the reason it is not pre-installed may be to avoid occupying too much user space). The dual application assistant allows for dual operation of applications, with popular applications like WeChat, QQ, and Weibo all supported, which many users may find useful.
Supports Dual Applications
Considering that some entry-level users may be elderly, the Red Pepper New National Monkey Sai Lei has also added an elderly mode. In this mode, the phone automatically makes some system adjustments for the elderly, such as enlarging fonts, extending touch response time, increasing volume, and enlarging icons, etc. The level of detail is much higher compared to many phones’ elderly modes. However, switching back to normal mode can be a bit cumbersome: it must be done through the settings menu.
Elderly Mode
VoLTE: Continuing the Previous Generation’s Features
The Red Pepper New National Monkey Sai Lei supports dual SIM dual standby and continues the previous generation’s support for VoLTE HD voice technology. VoLTE stands for Voice over LTE, which is an IP data transmission technology that allows for the unification of data and voice services over the same 4G network.
Due to the use of high-resolution encoding and decoding technology, VoLTE technology can improve voice quality by about 40%. VoLTE also has advantages in connection time, taking about 2 seconds, compared to 6-7 seconds in the 2G era. Finally, VoLTE has an extremely low drop rate, almost close to zero. In summary, based on VoLTE technology, the Red Pepper New National Monkey Sai Lei can provide users with an excellent network experience.
Conclusion Red Pepper Technology has always had ample experience in developing entry-level products, and the new National Monkey Sai Lei is a good reflection of this. The device features a simple yet exquisite appearance, with a quality that surpasses the cheap feel of plastic. It performs well in terms of performance, photography, and system, with balanced highlights, and supports features like dual applications and VoLTE HD voice. Although limited costs lead to some shortcomings in configuration and functionality, I still believe that the Red Pepper New National Monkey Sai Lei is an excellent choice among models in the same price range.
