Jan 28, 2016 04:59 PM
5540 Views
I have been using this fone for about 1.5 months and now I think I am in a position to write a review on this. I was tempted to buy this fone after seeing many reviews in Youtube, especially the ZenUI attracted me very much which have lots of customization options along with some nice tweaks under it sleeves. But how did it actually perform? Lets find out through some major good and bad things.
I bought it from Flipkart and anybody can visit its site to know the specs so I am not repeating it here. I will just highlight the pros and cons -
PROS -
1) Build quality is good. Fone does not look cheap at all. I am using the black variant. Red variant looks better though.
2) Display is 5.5" 720p and renders saturated color with some tweaks. VIewing angles are good. Text comes sharp. Display is pretty commendable I must say.
3) ZenUI offers several settings tweak to tinker with and many of them are very useful like Double tap to wake, Gesture controls with Zen Motion, a Cleaner with RAM booster, fantastic yet simple wallpapers, intuitive Lock Screen, useful functionalities for Flip Cover, nice Notification Center, DND mode, a few Power Saving modes, Easy mode, Kids mode, Guest Mode, in built App lock, Auto Start Manager and many more. The ZenUI is very much polished and slick to use.
4) With the help of Audio Wizard app, u can have good quality music experience with your headphone.
5) I did not play high-end games, but low-to medium graphic games like Candy Crush Saga, Beach Buggy Blitz, Subway Surfer etc. ran well. The fone did not heat up.
6) 4G works well. I even got a maximum of 10-11 mbps speed with my Airtel 4G while downloading from play store.
7) Many of the users complained about the low volume in Speakerphone(particularly some reviewers in Youtube), but I found it sufficient for daily use though actually it is somewhat in a lower-side, but the sound was crisp and clear.
CONS -
1) First thing first. The'Back' button is on the left. It is a pain to touch it in case of single-handed use.
2) Volume Rocker is in the backside. Design-wise it looks good but if u put a flip cover it some times become hard to sense whether I am touching the'incraese' or'decrease' part.
3) Charger is not a fast charger type. It takes hell lot of time to charge from Nil to Full. I should even warn u that it is much worse than many phones which do not support fast charging. Charging is absolutely slow.
4)'Laser Autofocus' is not a gimmick. It focuses really fast. But that is where the good things end. 13mp Rear cam can produce good pics in daylight, but be aware when shooting in low light because the results will be pathetic. Flash is also not very strong. And finally, the recent update of the PixelMaster camera is very much unstable.many times my fone got hanged when opening the camera app.
5) Front camera is so-so, nothing extra-ordinary to write about. In low light u will notice much noise in both rear and front cam.
6) 2GB RAM is of little use because multi-tasking is not that good. Just after installing 7-8 apps the fone becomes slow. Frankly speaking I do not bother to click the RAM Cleaner every time to clear RAM because just with the same specs I did not face any slow down issue in Galaxy E7.it was butter smooth even with Nova Launcher running along with 12-15 apps also running parallelly.
7) Battery back-up is another head-ache. After unboxing, in the very first day, I got approx 6-7 hrs of Screen On time. I was amazed then but alas.after some days when I installed a few apps and games, the battery back up gradually reduced noticeably. I will strongly recommend NOT TO UPDATE the fone's main firmware because before the update the battery back up was much better.
8) FM radio reception is not at all good. In case of Auto Scanning(several times) it could not find all the stations. The volume level from every station was much low(though quality was good).
9) If set to the max limit(in-call sound), while talking, the voice from other persons through the Earphone grill can be sometimes heard by others around you.
10) Recently I am facing the issue of disconnected from wi-fi network abruptly.i have never faced such an issue in any of my previous smartphones. I think the main culprit is that firmware update.
11) Through the flip-cover hole, u can control music, start your camera, light up the Torch and of-course receive/reject calls. So it has great functionality.but sometimes the fone shows'Unknown Number' when a call comes be it really a unknown number or from my phonebook(it even shows unknown number when my wife is calling.OMG!).
So there are several issues that I have faced. Your experience may differ according to your usage, update cycles(and your luck of course) etc., but honestly I am not impressed. I know I cant expect much from a sub 10k fone, but what haunts me is that many basic functions are not working properly. I would not recommend this fone though it is not all bad. And apart from that, if u are an old PC user then u may know that this Taiwan based company makes very good PC products like motherboards, graphics card etc.and that is why my expectation was higher.
