Spice has introduced yet another affordable handset. The new Spice Stellar Mi-360 is special, especially on one count – it comes with a QWERTY keypad along with a capacitive touchscreen. The device has been released for Rs 5,999.
Here is an exclusive review of the Spice Stellar Mi-360 and let’s see what it has to offer.
Design
The Mi-360 comes in white colour only as of now. The monotony of white is broken by the metal thread on its sides and the QWERTY keypad. Spice has given it a shiny finishing but the phone is not slippery. The phone is quite light weight as well as very thin and thus fits the palm.
In the handset, there is a 3.2 Megapixel camera in the rear, below which lies an LED flash. There is a speaker grill at the bottom of the rear panel, above which the brand name – Spice – is printed. The volume rocker and the power button are closely placed, but with enough space, in the right hand side. The 3.5 mm jack and the Micro USB ports are at the bottom.
The highlight of the phone is its QWERTY keypad. The buttons though tightly placed but each one of them come with a slightly raised portion that means you will only press one button at a time. Anyway, it has a 3.5 inch touchscreen and hence you can use its on-screen keypad as well. The capacitive touchscreen has good response as well. However, the screen has decent viewing angle as well as brightness.
All in all, the Spice Stellar Mi-360 looks good for a sub-Rs 6,000 handset and is well made.
Performance
The combination of 1.3 GHz dual core Mediatek MT6572 processor, Mali 400 MP GPU and 512 MB RAM, the Spice Stellar Mi-360 did offer decent performance. Not only it managed to open apps quite fast but it managed to run the Temple Run 2 with ease. It has got decent 9812 score on Antutu as well.
The device currently comes with Android 4.2 Jelly Bean operating system and not Android KitKat which could go against it considering that few newly launched devices like Moto E, Micromax Canvas Engage and Unite 2, and Lava Iris X1 come with latest Android 4.4 version.
Memory wise, it is like all other its competitors with 4 GB internal storage and 32 GB expandable storage slot. It has also two SIM slots offering 3G connectivity as well as WiFi, WiFi teetering, Bluetooth, and micro USB port for connectivity. Besides, the phone has FM radio and GPS. All the features worked nicely during interaction.
Battery
The Spice Stellar Mi-360 has a average 1500 mAh battery. As said by Spice, the handset offers battery life of about 5 hours. To check the claim we ran a test during which we played a movie of two hour and half hour at high brightness and 50 per cent volume. Then we played game for another 15 minute and watched YouTube videos for another half an hour. After that the phone had no more juice to continue. Now in real life we don’t use high brightness and thus, its battery back up with two SIM should easily be five hours as claimed.
The Mi360 was though quite outstanding when it comes to battery life. It managed to hold onto charge for 5-6 days comfortably. Officially, Spice though claims 8 days of standby.
Camera
The Spice Stellar Mi-360 has a 3.2 megapixel rear camera. It has a 1.3 megapixel front camera as well. Both the camera units are fixed focus in nature. The Mi 360 has panorama, 2X zoom and smile capture features too. From the settings, you could change exposure, color effect, scene mode, and white balance.
It also comes with continuous feature in which the camera can capture 40 shots at just one press. As far as quality goes, the front camera is good for video calling while the rear camera is average which is quite expected from a handset of this price.
Images by: Sushil Kumar