UMi promise Android 5.1.1 and CM12.1 on eMAX Mini, but where is 5.1 for the eMax?


umi emax mini

UMi have announced that the new eMax Mini will ship with Android 5.1.1 and will get CM12.1 as an option. Meanwhile eMax owners are still waiting for a long overdue Android 5.1 update.

We posted the news that UMi would release and Android 5.1 update for the UMi eMax on 23rd August, but where is it? Taking a look at UMi’s online community, we aren’t the only ones wondering where the update has disappeared to either. Owners of the eMax are getting impatient as they wait for the update, and hope that the release will fix bugs with the phone and improve poor camera performance.

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While current customers are being strung along though, UMi’s marketing team are already rubbing Android 5.1.1 and even CM12.1 in their faces!

In an announcement today, UMi revealed that the new UMi eMax Mini will launch with Android 5.1.1 installed as standard and that customers opting for the device can even run Cyanogen 12.1 on the phone via a RootJoy install.

It’s upsetting to see the company announce this news while eMax owners still wait in hope for their updates. The latest update news being that Android 5.1 will come to the eMax in a few weeks, around 6 weeks too late!

The eMax Mini will launch ‘soon’ according to the company, with 5-inch 1920 x 1080 display, 8 mega-pixel front camera, 13 mega-pixel rear and claimed 3050mAh battery.

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35 Comments

  1. CiroD
    September 30, 2015

    As far as we know eMax Mini will be a rebranded TCL 3s M3G so we can’t expect nothing more than TCL is (and that is not bad at all!)

    • September 30, 2015

      eMax is also a TCL phone too

  2. Radier
    September 30, 2015

    Because MediaTek never released sources for MT6732/6752 for Android 5.1 none device based on that SoC will ever get 5.1/5.1.1 officially.

    This is also a reason for MediaTek releasing MT6735/6753 SoC.

    Money talks…

    • Danny Wang
      October 1, 2015

      ??? Meizu M1 note is 6752, and currently has a quite robust beta running for 5.1

    • Alessandro
      October 9, 2015

      so, do you think that mediatek purely lowered specs of MT6735/6753 ( lower cpu freq and mali t720 vs mali t760 of older MT6732/6752) JUST TO SELL EASIER new helio x10 soc?

      i cannot find other real reasons!! or maybe… they found that mali t760 was not so much battery friendly…and decided to return to a safer t760 gpu to save energy. What do you think? it’s strange that a new gen of soc is WEAKER that older….

  3. Semi
    September 30, 2015

    from enthusiastic words about this company, to two articles full of anger… They must have pissed you big time in order to change this way, or maybe they did remove you from payroll?
    I thought this was a serious website, now I’m starting to realize it’s only “payland” where obscure brands get nice words and good products get bashed.
    farewell.

    • September 30, 2015

      What’s the issue? Nothing was said about the phone, just when Android 5.1 will roll out?. If we didn’t mention it it would have been brought up in the comments anyway.

      • Semi
        September 30, 2015

        No issue, but discrediting the news of CM on emax mini putting on the same news the emax update issue (as if umi is the only brand struggling with that update) is cheap in my books.

        • September 30, 2015

          We will be the first to report the news if CM is actually released, but we can’t ignore the fact that people are waiting for 5.1 on the eMax

          • Semi
            September 30, 2015

            people were waiting kitkat on galaxy s3 also, but the world didn’t seem to stop like with this umi lollipop update. As if all other chinese brands provided to respect the planned updates. Shit happens on those things and you should know better than me, but maybe it seems convenient to use this update thing to bash everything from now to eternity.

            • Airyl
              September 30, 2015

              The thing is, Elephone is brand that no one expects anything much from. They release a phone one day, and plan to make another one on the next, completely disregarding the last device. They’re notoriously bad at maintaining their devices, and they have so many different devices that it doesn’t come as a surprise.

              Umi on the other hand is a brand that we’ve come to trust over the years. They were one of the early tiny Chinese breakthrough brands along with JiaYu and Newman, so it’s sad to see them doing something like this and hurting the trust they’ve built up until now.

              And it hasn’t really been that big of a problem for many brands. JiaYu already has a pretty good build of 5.1 for the S3, the Siswoo R9 is already running it out of the box, same goes for the iOcean M6752, X9 and Ecoo E04 Advanced.

              And now there’s you, accusing us of such unchivalrous acts. Anyone who’s been on this site long enough knows that while we do praise brands every now and then, we also give criticism wherever it’s due. We’ve always open about these devices, as well as our thoughts on them or the brands that make them.

              I’ll leave you with this. If you honestly think we’re just bashing a brand that we’ve fondly spoken of for years because of money, then I’m sorry to say this but I’ll be glad to see you go. Hope you have a nice day.

            • Semi
              October 1, 2015

              I’ve been on the site long enough, and I know the beahaviour. I even remember a phone (Doogee Iron Bone) bashed without a reason after ten minutes the carrier passed to deliver it, which was before something “changed” and Doogee became “good”.
              I don’t even want to discuss the thing “elephone is crap, people know so we don’t tell anymore ” and “umi has a history so deserves to be bashed for every mistake until the end of time”.

              Yes, my opinion still remains that, from some time to now, here a brand is praised or bashed based on humor or on “kindness” of the brand towards the site, hope you’ll be able to prove all users wrong with FACTS and not only on comments, people are not stupid and know if something is valuable or not, “kind”/”hard” words or not.
              So we will be both happy, you because I leave, I because won’t have my intelligence insulted with posts saying how good doogee and bluboo are.
              Farewell.

            • Airyl
              October 1, 2015

              No, you haven’t been on this site long enough of that’s what you consider an old comment. That’s you pretending you know more than you actually do, and then bragging about it.

              The Iron Bone was simply a terrible phone. To this day, I’ve yet to meet someone who has told me positive things about the Iron Bone outside of “It’s got a good frame”. It was underspecced, overpriced, unoptimized and was a copy of the Mi4. Aside from that, we rarely praise Doogee, and our regular commentors know that.

              You don’t want to discuss it because you’re narrow minded. Either that, or you’ve already realized you’re wrong. Elephone isn’t a very trustworthy brand in updates, but their recent devices have been pretty good and they’ve managed to release kernel sources. They’re one of the earliest to allow this, and they deserve recognition where it’s due.

              Umi, as I’ve already explained, is a brand that we’ve been writing long before you even started visiting this site. Even though they’ve flubbed the update, we still write about them when something new pops up. We wrote positively about their UMI Voix Blu headphones. We wrote about how they may have been acquired by TCL. We wrote about the Umi eMax Mini when it was launched. We don’t even bash UMi nearly as much as we bash Elephone.

              What opinion? You never had an opinion to start with, all you did was throw a baseless accusation at us to look like a special snowflake. And this is my point when I say you haven’t been on this site long enough. We’ve always written our subjective thoughts in our articles. That’s the main reason we enjoy writing, because we get to share and discuss our opinions with our community. We write our opinions so that these companies can see our criticisms and act accordingly. You don’t understand that. You seem to think that we writers can’t have opinions, or that we need to be payed to form opinions.

              Yes, I’ll be plenty happy with you leaving this site. That’s one less snowflake to deal with.

            • King
              October 2, 2015

              Forgive him/her. I have been following Gizchina long enough. Love this site, love your articles and also the discussions in the comments. Keep up the good work guys.

            • Airyl
              October 2, 2015

              Thanks!

  4. CiroD
    September 30, 2015

    As far as we know eMax Mini will be a rebranded TCL 3s M3G so we can’t expect nothing more than TCL is (and that is not bad at all!)

    • Andi Sykes
      September 30, 2015

      eMax is also a TCL phone too

  5. Gizprick
    September 30, 2015

    that’s how a “british keyboard lion” acts (F5)

  6. Guest
    September 30, 2015

    Because MediaTek never released sources for MT6732/6752 for Android 5.1 none device based on that SoC will ever get 5.1/5.1.1 officially.

    This is also a reason for MediaTek releasing MT6735/6753 SoC.

    Money talks…

    • Danny Wang
      October 1, 2015

      ??? Meizu M1 note is 6752, and currently has a quite robust beta running for 5.1

    • Alessandro
      October 9, 2015

      so, do you think that mediatek purely lowered specs of MT6735/6753 ( lower cpu freq and mali t720 vs mali t760 of older MT6732/6752) JUST TO SELL EASIER new helio x10 soc?

      i cannot find other real reasons!! or maybe… they found that mali t760 was not so much battery friendly…and decided to return to a safer t760 gpu to save energy. What do you think? it’s strange that a new gen of soc is WEAKER that older….

  7. Semi
    September 30, 2015

    from enthusiastic words about this company, to two articles full of anger… They must have pissed you big time in order to change this way, or maybe they did remove you from payroll?
    I thought this was a serious website, now I’m starting to realize it’s only “payland” where obscure brands get nice words and who isn’t “collaborative” get bashed.
    farewell.

    • Andi Sykes
      September 30, 2015

      What’s the issue? Nothing was said about the phone, just when Android 5.1 will roll out?. If we didn’t mention it it would have been brought up in the comments anyway.

    • Semi
      September 30, 2015

      No issue, but discrediting the news of CM on emax mini putting on the same news the emax update issue (as if umi is the only brand struggling with that update) is cheap in my books.

    • Andi Sykes
      September 30, 2015

      We will be the first to report the news if CM is actually released, but we can’t ignore the fact that people are waiting for 5.1 on the eMax

    • Semi
      September 30, 2015

      people are still waiting lollipop for elephone p3000s (both 32 and 64 bit) and also kitkat on galaxy s3, but the world didn’t seem to stop like with this umi lollipop update. As if all other chinese brands provided to respect the planned updates. Shit happens on those things and you should know better than me, but maybe it seems convenient to use this update thing to bash everything from now to eternity.

    • Airyl
      September 30, 2015

      The thing is, Elephone is brand that no one expects anything much from. They release a phone one day, and plan to make another one on the next, completely disregarding the last device. They’re notoriously bad at maintaining their devices, and they have so many different devices that it doesn’t come as a surprise.

      Umi on the other hand is a brand that we’ve come to trust over the years. They were one of the early tiny Chinese breakthrough brands along with JiaYu and Newman, so it’s sad to see them doing something like this and hurting the trust they’ve built up until now.

      And it hasn’t really been that big of a problem for many brands. JiaYu already has a pretty good build of 5.1 for the S3, the Siswoo R9 is already running it out of the box, same goes for the iOcean M6752, X9 and Ecoo E04 Advanced. Yes, brands like Doogee and Elephone may be struggling with the update, but we don’t consider them to be on the same level of experience and trust as UMi.

      And now there’s you, accusing us of such unchivalrous acts. Anyone who’s been on this site long enough knows that while we do praise brands every now and then, we also give criticism wherever it’s due. We’ve always open about these devices, as well as our thoughts on them or the brands that make them.

      I’ll leave you with this. If you honestly think we’re just bashing a brand that we’ve fondly spoken of for years because of money, then I’m sorry to say this but I’ll be glad to see you go. Hope you have a nice day.

    • Semi
      October 1, 2015

      I’ve been on the site long enough, and I know the beahaviour. I even remember a phone (Doogee Iron Bone) bashed without a reason after ten minutes the carrier passed to deliver it, which was before something “changed” and Doogee became “good”.
      I don’t even want to discuss the thing “elephone is crap, people know so we don’t tell anymore ” and “umi has a history so deserves to be bashed for every mistake until the end of time”.

      Yes, my opinion still remains the one I expressed on first post, hope you’ll be able to prove all users wrong with FACTS and not only on comments, people are not stupid and know if something is valuable or not, “kind”/”hard” words or not.
      So we will be both happy, you because I leave, I because won’t have my intelligence insulted with posts saying how good doogee and bluboo are.
      Farewell.

    • Airyl
      October 1, 2015

      No, you haven’t been on this site long enough if that’s what you consider an old comment. That’s you pretending you know more than you actually do, and then bragging about it.

      The Iron Bone was simply a terrible phone. To this day, I’ve yet to meet someone who has told me positive things about the Iron Bone outside of “It’s got a good frame”. It was underspecced, overpriced, unoptimized and was a copy of the Mi4. Aside from that, we rarely praise Doogee, and our regular commentors know that.

      You don’t want to discuss it because you’re narrow minded. Either that, or you’ve already realized you’re wrong. Elephone isn’t a very trustworthy brand in updates, but their recent devices have been pretty good and they’ve managed to release kernel sources. They’re one of the earliest to allow this, and they deserve recognition where it’s due. The Vowney for example is looking to be one of their most promising phones so far. While there’s all the chance in the world that the Vowney will turn out bad, we’re still giving them the benefit of the doubt. Why? Because they’re still a young brand that haven’t found their footing. They still have time to grow, and we hope they manage to grow into a dependable brans eventually.

      Umi, as I’ve already explained, is a brand that we’ve been writing long before you even started visiting this site. Even though they’ve flubbed the update, we still write about them when something new pops up. We wrote positively about their UMI Voix Blu headphones. We wrote about how they may have been acquired by TCL. We wrote about the Umi eMax Mini when it was launched. We don’t even bash UMi nearly as much as we bash Elephone. It’s simply that they have a good reputation of being dependable, and this isn’t helping them. There’s not really much that you need to understand here, it’s simply stuff you don’t want to think about to convince yourself that you’re right.

      What opinion? You never had an opinion to start with, all you did was throw a baseless accusation at us to look like a special snowflake. And this is my point when I say you haven’t been on this site long enough. We’ve always written our subjective thoughts in our articles. That’s the main reason we enjoy writing, because we get to share and discuss our opinions with our community. We write our opinions so that these companies can see our criticisms and act accordingly. You don’t understand that. You seem to think that we writers can’t have opinions, or that we need to be payed to form opinions.

      Yes, I’ll be plenty happy with you leaving this site. That’s one less snowflake to deal with.

    • King
      October 2, 2015

      Forgive him/her. I have been following Gizchina long enough. Love this site, love your articles and also the discussions in the comments. Keep up the good work guys.

    • Airyl
      October 3, 2015

      Thanks!

  8. 3_nity
    September 30, 2015

    UMi promise? Do you mean “CRAP promise”?

  9. 3_nity
    September 30, 2015

    UMi promise? Do you mean “CRAP promise”?

  10. Chickens
    September 30, 2015

    If they release CM12.1 alongside the phone then it’s a plus for them. But if they ‘promise’ to release CM after a few months time and that CM is a factor in buying a phone then I’d rather recommend to wait first and read reviews/ user inputs of the CM rom when/if it is released.

  11. Chickens
    October 1, 2015

    If they release CM12.1 alongside the phone then it’s a plus for them. But if they ‘promise’ to release CM after a few months time and that CM is a factor in buying a phone then I’d rather recommend to wait first and read reviews/ user inputs of the CM rom when/if it is released.