Smartron is a brand new player in the smartphone space. The company prefers calling itself an IoT company, rather than just a smartphone company. It had released the Smartron t.book earlier, their answer to the Microsoft Surface Pro series 2-in-1s. The Smartron t.phone is the second consumer product from this Hyderabad-based company which boasts of legendary cricketer Sachin Tendulkar amongst its major investors.
Build and Design: 7.5/10
I've been used to seesingle colour phones flooding the market, so Smartron t.phone’s dual tone colour design was a refreshing change. Coming in four colours such as Classic Grey, Metallic Pink, Steel Blue and Sunrise Orange, the phones certainly stand out from the crowd. The Orange coloured model I got for testing, looks like it was made from the same metal used in making the t.book. The orange portion occupies the majority of the rear side with the top and bottom portions still having that gray metallic feel. A silver coloured Smartron logo graces the centre on the rear side. The metal body finish feels good in the hand and we did not find the phone to be too slippery either.
A 5.5-inch Full HD display graces the front. There are no buttons on the front, just a thin bezels on the top and bottom. The phone has fine curvatures around the sharp edges. A 4MP front camera is placed beside the earpierce speaker followed by the proximity sensor. It measures just around 6.98mm thick and is quite light to behold at 149 grams. One does tend to see a definite demarcation between where the display ends and the surrounding bezel begins, thanks to a slightly raised black coloured edge surrounding the display. The fit between the rear side and its top and bottom portions isn’t the best, as we noticed slight outward protrusions on both ends.
On the left hand side, you have the dual SIM card slot (micro SIM + nano SIM), the volume rocker and power/standby buttons are present on the right hand side. The 3.5mm audio jack is present on the top and a USB Type C port is present on the base.
Features: 7.5/10
For the t.phone, Smartron has stuck with a generation older Qualcomm Snapdragon 810 chipset which sports an octa-core CPU along with Adreno 430 GPU. This is paired with 4GB of LPDDR4 RAM, which is quite impressive thanks to the use of faster DDR4 memory. The phone comes with 64GB of storage and you can expand the storage to 128GB using a microSD card slot. But Smartron will also offer unlimited cloud storage (yes, unlimited cloud storage) for life, for an active Smartron user.
It runs on Android 6.0.1 Marshmallow OS with barely any sort of custom user interface upon it. The phone does bundle the Smartron Experience app which gives you access to Smartron features such as tstore, tcloud, tcare and more.
In terms of connectivity, you get a hybrid dual SIM card slot, Wi-fi 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac, Bluetooth 4.1 and it has sensors such as the accelerometer, gyroscope, barometer and much more. There’s a 3000mAh battery powering the t.phone. It is non-removable and supports USB Type-C fast charging with QuickCharge 2.0. Around this price point, nowadays the fingerprint scanner has become a norm. The t.phone does not come with one though.
Display: 7.5/10
You get a 5.5-inch Full HD display on the Smartron t.phone. The phone comes with Corning Gorilla Glass 3 protection along with oleophobic coating to prevent any smudges from accumulating on it and we have to say, it does a good job on that front. Smartron has gone with a Super AMOLED panel which makes the colours pop out. Smartron has also added what it calls Apical assertive display technology to ensure that legibility isn’t affected outdoors. We didn’t face much issues with legibility as such. The blacks are deep and it’s a pleasure to watch videos or play games on this display. However, some may find the display a bit too over saturated as the is the case with Super AMOLED panels. You cannot adjust the colour balance in the display settings, but it has an Assertive display option to assist with legibility in the sunlight.
Performance: 7.5/10
Call quality on the t.phone was quite good and there was no issue with the earpiece speaker. Considering it houses the Snapdragon 810 chipset along with 4GB RAM, there was no issues such as lag or phone slowdown or random shut down of apps. Even with 20 odd Chrome tabs open and a few apps running, there’s still enough headroom. The non-existent bloat and absence of unnecessary skinning really helps here.
The benchmark numbers are in line with other Snapdragon 810 chipset sporting phones we have tested in the past. The GFX GL Benchmark refused to run for some reason. It does get left behind by the Google Nexus 6P which has 3GB RAM. In real life usage, this phone performed as you’d expect a Rs 20k plus phone to perform.
Camera: 6/10
There is a 13MP rear camera and a 4MP front-facing camera. The rear camera comes with a 1.12 micrometer pixel size, f/2.0 aperture, phase-detect auto focus, HDR for photos and much more. It is also capable of shooting 4K videos. The front-facing camera sports a 4MP sensor with 2 micrometer pixel size and f/2.0 aperture.
Low light image quality is quite mediocre though as images are quite noisy. When you are selling a phone priced over Rs 20,000, camera is one aspect that needs to be paid significant attention to. We found that to be lacking in the current state on the t.phone.
Battery: 5/10
The battery life on the Smartron t.phone was definitely not up to the mark. We barely got through a full work day even with just regular tasks such as surfing the web, mailing, messaging, calling and so on. If it’s a heavy day, the battery runs out within five to six hours. There wasn’t a day when we did not have to charge the device at least once during the work day. And this is true even if you keep the brightness levels around 30 percent. Even PC Mark for Android gives only around 5 hours battery life. Smartron really does need to improve its battery management prowess through future updates, else the phone is of no appeal to power users.
0 comments:
Post a Comment