European users of Intex Aquafish share your experience

answered 2016-09-21 18:33:15 +0300

geodi
231 ●1 ●2 ●3

I just wanted to experiment the ebay buying of Aquafish to Finland, worked well with total cost of about 130€. I found the dual sim so useful that I no longer use my Jolla1 much. Everything seems to work, even 4g, google services, and gaana removed. Aurajoki backup from Jolla1 via DropBox was happily restored to AquaFish. Battery life is ok, need to load every 2-3 days, better than with Jolla1 coupled with the Aurajoki battery drain. I even start to like the bigger screen. I can happily recommend the phone, and thank you Jolla team for the new SailFish phone available!

answered 2016-09-21 13:19:10 +0300

hubat
433 ●4 ●7 ●11

updated 2016-09-21 15:32:42 +0300

I am using an Intex Aqua Fish as my two years old Jolla1 didn't survive a cleaning cycle in the washing machine with 1600 rpm :-( so I can compare.

I have removed the Gaana app and Intex repository as described in another thread on tjc.

General build build quality is not impressive but better than I thought, given the very low price. The larger ram and the processor allow for a significant smoother experience when running a few andoidid apps as I regularly do. Battery life is much better, even with Google Services running (shame on me for using them). One full charge gives me two days, even with Wifi and Bluetooth turned on most of the time and listening to podcasts a lot. This is roughly double the time I could expect from my slightly aged Jolla1 battery.

My carrier doesn't offer LTE in it's services, so I cannot comment on that aspect. G3 works perfectly, though, and that is good enough for me.

Overall I am pretty happy with the phone and can recommend it at that price point, even though I find the form factor a bit too large - but I guess that is a matter of taste anyway.

answered 2016-10-29 23:24:43 +0300

Cmdr_Zod
5098 ●51 ●65 ●64

updated 2017-07-11 02:19:37 +0300

I imported an Aqua Fish to Switzerland and I currently carry it together with my original Jolla (I always do this when buying a new phone to get used to it and after a few days/weeks, I switch over to the new one). My old Jolla now loses its WWAN-connection about once a day and needs a reboot to "fix" it, so I will switch to the Intex once Saifish OS 2.0.4 is available for it.

So, how do they compare?

• WWAN; I use Sunrise SIM-cards in both devices (at the same time); in city areas (with dense population) there is no difference, in more rural areas, the Aqua Fish falls back to 3G (with HSDPA), while the Jolla 1 is still on 4G. The coverage (ignoring the speed) is the same for my daily usage. The providers are using the higher frequency to cover dense areas, and in rural regions, they use 800MHz, because it allows to have larger areas covered with one cell tower. 3G seems to be good enough for all my mobile needs like surfing the Web, SSH or modRana (application for Open Streetmap)

  With Tethering, 3G is limiting my user experience, I need more bandwidth on a notebook because the websites are larger, and I am faster checking websites and opening new tabs/links.

• Display: Handling the larger Aqua Fish with one hand is sometimes a bit of a problem, but the additional screen size is an advantage. At the beginning, I had the impression that browsers were not always making use of the additional screen size, but I no longer see that.
• Status LED: The Aqua Fish has a status LED, but it is white only. I really miss the different colors of the Jolla 1
• Camera: The optical coating of my Jolla 1 is really scratched, but the pictures of the Aqua Fish are still not much better (In fact, I would still prefer the camera in my old Nokia N900 over the Jolla 1 and Aqua Fish).
• Performance: I can't tell to much about CPU power, I don't have the impression to have more performance at hand. I tend to have a lot of open tabs in the browser, and this works much better on the Aqua Fish, probably because of the additional memory.
• File system: The Aqua Fish is using ext4. I expect ext4 to be more robust, especially when running out of disk space.
• Battery life: Can't really compare it right now, as I don't use these two devices in the same way. Right now, I miss the option to get a spare battery for the Intex phone (I have one for the Jolla, but to be honest, I did not run ouf of battery since I have a spare). I have the impression that the Intex is loosing quite a bit of charge over night, just sitting on the table, with not activity, beside being on the WWAN connection.
• Build quality: The Intex seems to be made a bit cheaper than the Jolla 1 (The logo on the backside has already lost its "x", the letters are made of silver plastic in a molded recess), but it is not bad. The packaging contains a protective film for the screen, but I did not apply it, because I always carry my phone in a belt pouch. Only time will tell how the device copes with daily use. UPDATE 20161110: I managed to scratch my display somehow (just a tiny scratch, I have now Idea how it happened) and will now apply a protective screen.
• FM radio: There was no autoscan and no speaker mode in SFOS 2.0.2 (finding the stations was really cumbersome), both should be fixed in version 2.0.4. I used to listen a lot to FM Radio on the N900, no idea if I will again start listening to it on the Aqua Fish. It is 2016, and i would clearly prefer a DAB+ tuner.
• Power/volume buttons: The power button and the volume buttons have switched their position, which takes some time to getting used to it (I often used the power button to turn on the screen, and now I hit "volume up").
• Shape: The original device had an easily distinguishable front and backside (rounded edge on the long side of the device and on the short edge of the other half ), which made it easy to blindly grab the phone and always hold it the right way. This is of course a small detail, but it is really handy, and I miss it on the Aqua Fish.

Conclusion: I would buy the Intex again. At the price I paid, it is really a bargain. I already ordered a second device as a spare, because at the price for the device + shipping, I would probably not send it back to India for a repair, should it fail during or after its warranty period.

What I miss the most on the Aqua Fish are the colors of the status LED.

answered 2016-10-12 22:40:14 +0300

mrtrm
755 ●21 ●29 ●40

I ordered one on eBay, but Belgian customs took it in custody and forced me to sign a paper to resign from receiving the phone to avoid judicial prosecution. Lost the phone and the money.

answered 2016-10-04 16:41:58 +0300

pawel
14895 ●231 ●341 ●376

aquafish now costs 65euro on amazon.in. so why thinking ? just buy it. i did yesterday

answered 2016-10-04 12:25:58 +0300

magullo
2625 ●26 ●55 ●53

http://gravatar.com/magul...

updated 2016-10-04 12:26:25 +0300

Here I am, first day with Aqua Fish. First thing first, I tryed to restore a Jolla 1 backup, but it seems it's not so easy:

What worked:

• Photos
• Jolla, Twitter, XMMP, Microsoft (Outlook) were correctly restored

What didn't work

• Exchange account
• Application list (is it under backup?)
• Call log
• SMSes (I had to import using commhistory-tool, no calls)

In Italy I had 4G available for both TIM and 3, so no problem here.

answered 2016-11-10 22:41:39 +0300

martonmiklos
2891 ●55 ●122 ●110

http://balubati.atw.hu/bl...

I have purchased one from India about a month ago.

I do not use any Android apps, and I only have wifi connection.

I did not had high expectations because of the price range. (My father always told me that miracles does not exists: you get what you paid for.)

SW wise: As a first usage step I have performed Coderus's "cheat" on my device, so it is pretty much the same experience what I have used to with the JP1.

The UI feels a bit more fluid and faster than the JP1 thanks to the RAM I think.

HW wise: It has a feeling that it is a cheap phone. The plastics, the molding residuals on the lock button. Somehow the JP1 was felt a higher grade phone (yes it started from a way higher price range) .

First it was hard to get used to the unlock button position. My Nokia N9 had it below the volume buttons, the JP1 had it above, now it have at the middle.

The camera quality is worse than the JP1. I have not made direct comparisons, but in average it makes noisy pictures.

The battery life is better, however my JP1 had ~1year old battery.

My favourite feature the LUX in the lock screen pulley menu did not worked at first, but I got it fixed.

Anyway I think it was a good buy, in the same price range I could have bought a low end Android device, which would have much more compromises I think.

answered 2016-10-16 16:58:49 +0300

ghling
4414 ●58 ●89 ●96

After nearly 4 weeks with my Aqua Fish, I'm really happy with it. I can't compare it to the Jolla 1, since I came from a Nexus 5 with Custom Android Roms, but compared to that I really appreciate the possibility to manually adjust settings via SSH. Also, I'm living in Switzerland and don't have problems with 4G (At least the phone claims, it has 4G connection with my provider Sunrise). Even though I missed some security features I was used to from Android (especially Phone encryption, Firewall and Permission Management a la XPrivacy) at first, some considerations showed me, that this is not a real loss for me (gathering data from a PIN-locked Sailfish device should be quite hard, if even possible. Firewall and Permission Management are not really required for me, as I'm not using much Apps). But this clearly depends on how you want to use your phone. I wanted a secure system (hence sailfish) and use the AlienDalvik only for a few Android Apps every now and then which are not available for Sailfish. If you want to use many Android Apps on a daily basis, you might want to have more control over them.

I "converted" my Aqua Fish pretty much to a Jolla C by removing all the Intex-specific packages and replaced them with the "official" Jolla ones. This was a bit tricky at times and needed a bit more than half a day time, but now I don't need to worry about any modifications from vanilla (like that weird SMS activation service from Intex or this music store). A pretty good guide for that can be found here: https://together.jolla.com/question/139540/how-to-removing-intex-content-from-aqua-fish/

I'm currently waiting for a proper screen protector to arrive and hope that there will be back panels in other colors available, but other than that I'm very content with my Aqua Fish (especially considering its price).

answered 2016-10-04 15:30:10 +0300

Dankoozy
481 ●14 ●20 ●28

I have been using my Aqua Fish two months now and it's going quite well. Battery life is quite terrible compared to the Jolla. 4G seems finnicky, it registers to the network but it doesn't seem to work :(

answered 2016-10-12 13:30:53 +0300

pawel
14895 ●231 ●341 ●376

updated 2016-10-14 11:57:35 +0300

I have it since a week. 4G works, camera is not good but better then in my Jolla1 that did always produce blueish pics inside. ear piece is much louder too. with jolla1 i was at max volume and it was not loud enough.

you can have more apps open due to more RAM. apps are running smooth, all but wareshouse ;-)

screen has nice colours. i am satisfied. i have troubles with restore backup. contacts i was able to sync with bluetooth. rest is pending.

jolla 1 was on 2.0.4.13; after i did update aquafish to 2.0.4 i was able to restore backup.