Music with a quality mark: DEXP Ixion M350 Rock smartphone review
The Russian brand DEXP some time ago made a good noise in the audiophile community by announcing a smartphone with the prefix “Rock” in the title. The declared characteristics of the hardware platform brought the device very close to the top models, and since the DEXP music players have been known for a long time, the announcement of the imminent release of the device to the market made those who cannot afford a smartphone for 30,000 rubles stand up. The manufacturer promised a chic sound that for inexpensive smartphones, in general, still sounds fantastic. The device fell into my hands as is, that is, in the final retail version - it's time to check all the “goodies” on your own skin. And the ears.

To begin, consider the filling of the device:
Inexpensive smartphones have finally grown to Lollipop, which is excellent in itself: Android is still too young an operating system, it has plenty of childhood diseases. Version 5.1 received its portion of improvements, and due to the optimization, the hardware now works 15-20% faster than the annoyed version 4.4. The system in this case was not subjected to refinement, except that a number of local services were added, so I will immediately show the performance of the “candy” in the DEXP Ixion M350 Rock.





The second "goodies" - the presence of LTE. The third advantage will be appreciated by lovers of practicality. The developers did not pursue record-breaking characteristics, but acted extremely logical: the device is equipped with a decent 3140 mAh battery with PowerBank function and an IPS-screen with a resolution of 1280 x 720 pixels.
Let me explain: Chinese manufacturers like Doogee, Xiaomi, etc. I’d surely would have kindly slapped a Full-HD screen into the device, which will look like “wow!” in the list of characteristics, but at five inches the resolution of 1280 x 720 pixels already gives indistinguishable pixels, due to the high gluttony of the Full-HD screen battery life would have fallen sharply, one could completely forget about the PowerBank function. As you know, the best is the enemy of the good.
Packaging a little surprised by its modesty. For my taste, it would be logical to design an apparatus for audiophiles not so strictly and modestly. In particular, in addition to the discreet signature “ROCK”, it is immediately and incomprehensible what kind of animal it is.

The second time I was surprised by the configuration. However, only for a couple of seconds: deliberate asceticism consisted in the presence of the device itself, a manual, an OTG cable and a charger. A very high-quality protective film (its thinness and absence of chromatic aberration is noticeable) has already been applied by the factory method. But there is no headset!

But it would be strange that when buying a Yamaha tube amplifier for $ 5,000, it would be equipped with regular "ears" of dubious quality for a miserable thousand bucks. Indeed, really decent headphones themselves cost 20,000 rubles, which is 2.5 times more expensive than the smartphone itself. It’s cruel to frustrate an impatient music lover in advance at the first acquaintance with the audio capabilities of the device - you won’t want such a competitor!
I have thin hands - convenient for the neck, but impractical for large smartphones. Still, 5 inches turned out to be a little inconvenient for interacting with the interface with one finger. The back panel is suspiciously smooth and reflects everything, but in fact the case is completely plastic and easily dirty. The protective coating here does not smell. The smooth back cover slides slightly and is likely to quickly get small scratches, so the cover does not hurt.


But the screen is completely non-marking, with excellent viewing angles. In direct sunlight, it barely burns out (the thinness of the protective film affects, but here you have to choose either high contrast or chromatic aberration), but this does not interfere. Rather, it was my ugliness leaping.

For even more suspicious ones - the smartphone is equipped with a MiraVision fine-tuning system. In the option "User Mode" are additionally available: contrast, saturation, brightness, sharpness, color temperature, dynamic contrast.



Color temperature is just a gift! The fact is that the green and red channels are very stable, but the blue color channel is oversaturated. The problem is that a blue phosphor with good quality is a very expensive pleasure. It’s one thing to use cheap CaS • Bi or CaS / SrS • Bi and ditch half of the chemical workers with volatile bismuth or very “funny” strontium; it’s another to use clathate-polymer monsters with an effective yield of 0.05% decent, but not ideal quality.
As a result, the blue component noticeably breaks the standard 6500K. But why do we need a hardware ideal for thousands of dollars if the flaw can be corrected with a slider for a millionth cent?

The battery under the rear panel is non-removable (more precisely, to remove it, you have to work with a screwdriver), so that we only have a microSD card slot and two micro-SIM slots. Hooray! The eternal, small but wacky headache with the confusion between micro and nano in my frequent trips will kill anyone.

But the “non-removability” of the battery adds rigidity to the entire structure, which is very important for acoustics.
Under the battery you can see an unusual speaker, consisting of three compartments, suspiciously reminiscent of notebook analogues. Suspicions are amplified by the declared power of 2 watts, which not every laptop boasts. Surely, hardware logic distributes a common channel and stereo, because the speaker consists of three sections (in fact, 2.1). The manufacturer without details mentioned the special membrane material and the same special general coating. Since I had to remake conventional acoustic guitars to flamenco, I’ll say with 95% probability that it is so: special lacquered plates inside the deck “increase” the resonator several times, which is why an almost Austrian sound is extracted from the Shostka “shovel”. The smartphone also uses spraying, which gives rigidity to all the acoustic parts of the speaker. Distortions disappear and power loss is noticeably reduced. But about the sound - at the very end.
The volume buttons are separate and thin, from the opposite end of them we see the power key.


At the top is the audio output and microUSB connector, at the bottom is a microphone.


The quad-core ARM Cortex-A53 processor is frankly very good, although the frequency of 1 GHz per core is a bit confusing. Various sources say that this is either the standard or the base frequency. Actually, I am not a fan of synthetic tests and prefer to test hardware in real applications.
The same goes for RAM. One gigabyte will not surprise anyone, but you should also consider the cost of the device (about 8,500 rubles).
But! Again, suspicions turn out to be groundless: SoC, in addition to the four ARM Cortex-A53 cores, includes a powerful Mali-T720 accelerator with support for Open GL ES 3.0 and the Open CL 1.2 API. Only an engineering-financial suicide would combine in one crystal components that were inconsistent in optimization: Full-HD video plays well at a speed of 30 frames per second, and the power consumption is low - the continuous playback time is from 6 to 10 hours depending on the complexity of the video scenes (compared anime and film).
In fact, after a fuss with codecs, it is quite possible to play video in 2K resolution without lags (more precisely, 2-3 half-second hitch for an hour) and even 4K, but with easy frequent slowdowns.





By today's standards, performance indicators are average, which does not prevent the smartphone from working confidently with 3D games.



Out of 8 GB, a little less than five gigs are available.

Nothing special to say about cameras. The main matrix of Samsung S5K4H5YC proved to be quite good. If this matrix has been installed in different models of “soap boxes” of the middle price category for 2 years already, and before that it has been installed in “pseudo-mirrors” for about a year, then this is clearly a great choice for a smartphone. The matrix from OmniVision is used for a selfie camera and has long been found in nimble gaming laptops. This is also, in general, a compliment.




And finally, the long-awaited Rock!

To put it dryly, the sensitivity in audio frequencies is 10-20% higher than the iPhone 6 in the entire frequency range, except for the section from 11 kHz to 20 kHz, where both devices are completely identical! High frequencies are noticeably worse distinguished by the human ear than bass, but even the one to whom bears tread their ears daily will notice the juiciness and high selectivity of both bass and high frequencies. After that, any fan of pop music with synthesizers with their flat sound will begin to feverishly listen to classics and rock.


This is confirmed by the graph of intermodulation distortion - from 0 Hz to 4 KHz, our Rock is 10-20% lower than iPhone 6. Then the devices go flush, and Rock again pulled ahead Rock, with a triple peak in the region of 18 KHz, in the range from 14 KHz to 20 KHz .
If you explain it on your fingers, then the resonant distortions mixing and lubricating individual frequencies into an indefinite noise are so low that the usual “boo boo boo” bass guitar can suddenly be heard no worse than an excellent bright solo, and even in the performance of a symphony orchestra, even Scriabin turns in Jean-Baptiste Lully! Musicians know the term “color hearing” (it’s almost reaching the absolute pitch, which can be developed by training), and now you just need to pick up headphones to your smartphone - the sensations are similar.
In my case, comparatively the same aesthetic bliss in the style of a cat that fell in sour cream was provided by semi-professional Bowers & Wilkins P7 (10 Hz - 20 KHz, 111 dB, 22 Ohms) and Sennheiser CX 300-II “pokes” (19 Hz - 21 KHz, 113 dB, 16 Ohms) with almost identical characteristics.
The subjective sound quality of the speaker exceeds even the sound of the old Altec Lansing VS4121, which I have not wanted to get rid of for many years, with richness and clarity. Well, the volume makes even some top-end gaming laptops blush, without distortion.
I note that the device uses a codec designed specifically for the characteristics of this model by MaxxAudio (Grammy award, whatever one may say!), And the amplifier is from NXP, a division of Philips, which has fiercely competed with Yamaha in audio electronics for many years since the legendary OPL3.

The conclusion is surprisingly simple: DEXP Ixion M350 Rock clearly arrogantly tries on the role of a competitor to the top Highscreen Boost 3. The excess characteristics of Boost 3 “modestly” beat the difference in cost - 20,000 against 8,500 rubles!

To begin, consider the filling of the device:
Screen: 5-inch IPS resolution of 1280 x 720 pixels;
Case Material: Plastic;
3G: WCDMA 2100, WCDMA 900;
4G (LTE): yes;
SIM card format: 2 x Micro-SIM (15 x 12 x 0.76 mm);
Hardware platform: MediaTek MT6735P (4 cores, 64 bits);
CPU core frequency: 1 GHz;
Graphics Accelerator: Mali-T720 MP1;
RAM capacity: 1 GB;
The amount of internal memory: 8 GB;
Type of memory card: microSD;
Sensors: accelerometer, proximity sensor, light;
FM radio: yes;
Resolution of the sensor of the main camera: 8 megapixels;
Built-in flash: yes;
Front camera sensor resolution: 5 megapixels;
Wi-Fi: 802.11b / g / n;
Communications: Bluetooth 4.0, GPS;
Battery capacity: 3140 mAh;
Operating System: Android 5.1 Lollipop.
Inexpensive smartphones have finally grown to Lollipop, which is excellent in itself: Android is still too young an operating system, it has plenty of childhood diseases. Version 5.1 received its portion of improvements, and due to the optimization, the hardware now works 15-20% faster than the annoyed version 4.4. The system in this case was not subjected to refinement, except that a number of local services were added, so I will immediately show the performance of the “candy” in the DEXP Ixion M350 Rock.





The second "goodies" - the presence of LTE. The third advantage will be appreciated by lovers of practicality. The developers did not pursue record-breaking characteristics, but acted extremely logical: the device is equipped with a decent 3140 mAh battery with PowerBank function and an IPS-screen with a resolution of 1280 x 720 pixels.
Let me explain: Chinese manufacturers like Doogee, Xiaomi, etc. I’d surely would have kindly slapped a Full-HD screen into the device, which will look like “wow!” in the list of characteristics, but at five inches the resolution of 1280 x 720 pixels already gives indistinguishable pixels, due to the high gluttony of the Full-HD screen battery life would have fallen sharply, one could completely forget about the PowerBank function. As you know, the best is the enemy of the good.
Packaging a little surprised by its modesty. For my taste, it would be logical to design an apparatus for audiophiles not so strictly and modestly. In particular, in addition to the discreet signature “ROCK”, it is immediately and incomprehensible what kind of animal it is.

The second time I was surprised by the configuration. However, only for a couple of seconds: deliberate asceticism consisted in the presence of the device itself, a manual, an OTG cable and a charger. A very high-quality protective film (its thinness and absence of chromatic aberration is noticeable) has already been applied by the factory method. But there is no headset!

But it would be strange that when buying a Yamaha tube amplifier for $ 5,000, it would be equipped with regular "ears" of dubious quality for a miserable thousand bucks. Indeed, really decent headphones themselves cost 20,000 rubles, which is 2.5 times more expensive than the smartphone itself. It’s cruel to frustrate an impatient music lover in advance at the first acquaintance with the audio capabilities of the device - you won’t want such a competitor!
I have thin hands - convenient for the neck, but impractical for large smartphones. Still, 5 inches turned out to be a little inconvenient for interacting with the interface with one finger. The back panel is suspiciously smooth and reflects everything, but in fact the case is completely plastic and easily dirty. The protective coating here does not smell. The smooth back cover slides slightly and is likely to quickly get small scratches, so the cover does not hurt.


But the screen is completely non-marking, with excellent viewing angles. In direct sunlight, it barely burns out (the thinness of the protective film affects, but here you have to choose either high contrast or chromatic aberration), but this does not interfere. Rather, it was my ugliness leaping.

For even more suspicious ones - the smartphone is equipped with a MiraVision fine-tuning system. In the option "User Mode" are additionally available: contrast, saturation, brightness, sharpness, color temperature, dynamic contrast.



Color temperature is just a gift! The fact is that the green and red channels are very stable, but the blue color channel is oversaturated. The problem is that a blue phosphor with good quality is a very expensive pleasure. It’s one thing to use cheap CaS • Bi or CaS / SrS • Bi and ditch half of the chemical workers with volatile bismuth or very “funny” strontium; it’s another to use clathate-polymer monsters with an effective yield of 0.05% decent, but not ideal quality.
As a result, the blue component noticeably breaks the standard 6500K. But why do we need a hardware ideal for thousands of dollars if the flaw can be corrected with a slider for a millionth cent?

The battery under the rear panel is non-removable (more precisely, to remove it, you have to work with a screwdriver), so that we only have a microSD card slot and two micro-SIM slots. Hooray! The eternal, small but wacky headache with the confusion between micro and nano in my frequent trips will kill anyone.

But the “non-removability” of the battery adds rigidity to the entire structure, which is very important for acoustics.
Under the battery you can see an unusual speaker, consisting of three compartments, suspiciously reminiscent of notebook analogues. Suspicions are amplified by the declared power of 2 watts, which not every laptop boasts. Surely, hardware logic distributes a common channel and stereo, because the speaker consists of three sections (in fact, 2.1). The manufacturer without details mentioned the special membrane material and the same special general coating. Since I had to remake conventional acoustic guitars to flamenco, I’ll say with 95% probability that it is so: special lacquered plates inside the deck “increase” the resonator several times, which is why an almost Austrian sound is extracted from the Shostka “shovel”. The smartphone also uses spraying, which gives rigidity to all the acoustic parts of the speaker. Distortions disappear and power loss is noticeably reduced. But about the sound - at the very end.
The volume buttons are separate and thin, from the opposite end of them we see the power key.


At the top is the audio output and microUSB connector, at the bottom is a microphone.


The quad-core ARM Cortex-A53 processor is frankly very good, although the frequency of 1 GHz per core is a bit confusing. Various sources say that this is either the standard or the base frequency. Actually, I am not a fan of synthetic tests and prefer to test hardware in real applications.
The same goes for RAM. One gigabyte will not surprise anyone, but you should also consider the cost of the device (about 8,500 rubles).
But! Again, suspicions turn out to be groundless: SoC, in addition to the four ARM Cortex-A53 cores, includes a powerful Mali-T720 accelerator with support for Open GL ES 3.0 and the Open CL 1.2 API. Only an engineering-financial suicide would combine in one crystal components that were inconsistent in optimization: Full-HD video plays well at a speed of 30 frames per second, and the power consumption is low - the continuous playback time is from 6 to 10 hours depending on the complexity of the video scenes (compared anime and film).
In fact, after a fuss with codecs, it is quite possible to play video in 2K resolution without lags (more precisely, 2-3 half-second hitch for an hour) and even 4K, but with easy frequent slowdowns.





By today's standards, performance indicators are average, which does not prevent the smartphone from working confidently with 3D games.



Out of 8 GB, a little less than five gigs are available.

Nothing special to say about cameras. The main matrix of Samsung S5K4H5YC proved to be quite good. If this matrix has been installed in different models of “soap boxes” of the middle price category for 2 years already, and before that it has been installed in “pseudo-mirrors” for about a year, then this is clearly a great choice for a smartphone. The matrix from OmniVision is used for a selfie camera and has long been found in nimble gaming laptops. This is also, in general, a compliment.




And finally, the long-awaited Rock!

To put it dryly, the sensitivity in audio frequencies is 10-20% higher than the iPhone 6 in the entire frequency range, except for the section from 11 kHz to 20 kHz, where both devices are completely identical! High frequencies are noticeably worse distinguished by the human ear than bass, but even the one to whom bears tread their ears daily will notice the juiciness and high selectivity of both bass and high frequencies. After that, any fan of pop music with synthesizers with their flat sound will begin to feverishly listen to classics and rock.


This is confirmed by the graph of intermodulation distortion - from 0 Hz to 4 KHz, our Rock is 10-20% lower than iPhone 6. Then the devices go flush, and Rock again pulled ahead Rock, with a triple peak in the region of 18 KHz, in the range from 14 KHz to 20 KHz .
If you explain it on your fingers, then the resonant distortions mixing and lubricating individual frequencies into an indefinite noise are so low that the usual “boo boo boo” bass guitar can suddenly be heard no worse than an excellent bright solo, and even in the performance of a symphony orchestra, even Scriabin turns in Jean-Baptiste Lully! Musicians know the term “color hearing” (it’s almost reaching the absolute pitch, which can be developed by training), and now you just need to pick up headphones to your smartphone - the sensations are similar.
In my case, comparatively the same aesthetic bliss in the style of a cat that fell in sour cream was provided by semi-professional Bowers & Wilkins P7 (10 Hz - 20 KHz, 111 dB, 22 Ohms) and Sennheiser CX 300-II “pokes” (19 Hz - 21 KHz, 113 dB, 16 Ohms) with almost identical characteristics.
The subjective sound quality of the speaker exceeds even the sound of the old Altec Lansing VS4121, which I have not wanted to get rid of for many years, with richness and clarity. Well, the volume makes even some top-end gaming laptops blush, without distortion.
I note that the device uses a codec designed specifically for the characteristics of this model by MaxxAudio (Grammy award, whatever one may say!), And the amplifier is from NXP, a division of Philips, which has fiercely competed with Yamaha in audio electronics for many years since the legendary OPL3.

The conclusion is surprisingly simple: DEXP Ixion M350 Rock clearly arrogantly tries on the role of a competitor to the top Highscreen Boost 3. The excess characteristics of Boost 3 “modestly” beat the difference in cost - 20,000 against 8,500 rubles!