Smartron, after a long gap, has come with a new smartphone. Dubbed as t.phone P, the device comes with a price of Rs 7,999 and it will be available from Flipkart starting from January 17, 2018.
This is the third smartphone from the company’s arsenal after srt.phone and first-generation t.phone. With the latest smartphone, Smartron is trying to eye the heart of the Indian smartphone market—budget segment—and it has loaded the smartphone with some decent specifications and an impressive 5000mAh battery to battle the likes of Xiaomi, Motorola, and more. But will it make any difference? We got the chance to use the device for a brief time and here are our first impressions.
Design and Display
It is a sad truth that smartphone these days, especially in the budget segment, have become so identical that one simply cannot distinguish between two devices if we remove the branding. And to some extent, this one follows the same trend. The smartphone does give a pretty standard look and resembles other smartphones like Xiaomi Redmi 5A or more. Though, in spite sporting a 5.2-inch screen, the device is quite compact which makes it easier to hold. The phone is lightweight as well, despite featuring a massive 5000mAh battery.
There are some noticeable bezels at the top and bottom of the display, though side bezels are slim. The top of the front panel houses a selfie camera along with an earpiece, while at the base, there are physical navigation buttons, which are backlit in nature. A good move, indeed! The right houses volume controls and power on/off button, while on the left, there is a hybrid Dual-SIM slot. The top houses a Headphone jack, while at the bottom, you get a Micro USB port flanked by two speaker grilles.
The back panel is made of plastic, which does not feel cheap and there is a rear camera at the top left position along with a LED flash. The back also houses a fingerprint sensor and just beneath it is company’s logo. That said, the smartphone looks good, but so does any other smartphone in this price range.
Coming to the display, the Smartron t.phone P sports a 5.2-inch HD display with a screen Resolution of 1280 x 720 pixels. The screen comes with an aspect ratio of 16:9 and it features a 2.5D curved glass on the top. The display tends to offer some good colour output and the brightness is up to the mark. However, we noticed that the device gives some bluish and yellowish tint when viewed from different angles, which is not a good thing. We will talk more about this in our detailed review.
Hardware and Software
Coming to the internals, the device is powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 435 quad-core Processor clocked at 1.4GHz. The device is backed by a 3GB of RAM and 32GB of internal storage, which can be further expanded up to 128GB via micro SD card slot. Smartron is also offering 1000GB of Cloud Storage through its t.cloud service as well. Talking about the sheer specifications, the device is on par with rest of the smartphones and it would be interesting to see whether it will give a stiff competition to the likes of Xiaomi Redmi 5A, InFocus Vision 3, Lenovo K8 Plus and more or not.
On the software front, the device runs on tronX UI, which is based on Android 7.1 Nougat. The user interface is quite close to stock, though you few apps from Microsoft and Google. Then there are new apps for the company as well including t-care, t-store, t-cloud etc. The user interface looks smooth to operate during our brief testing time. So, stay tuned to us for more details in our detailed review.
Camera
Coming to the camera, the Smartron t.phone P comes with a 13-megapixel rear camera with f/2.2 aperture, PDAF and LED flash. For the front, there is a 5-megapixel shooter for selfies and video calling. The camera UI is pretty clean and yes, there is a manual mode, through which you can control exposure, aperture, shutter speed and more.
The UI also comes with some interesting modes like multi-exposure, panorama, time-lapse and beautify to play around. During our initial testing, we found out that the device performance was quite average, as one can see a bit of yellowish tint in the photos. But it is too early to comment on the camera performance, so we suggest you hold your horse and wait for our review.
Battery and Connectivity
The major highlight of the smartphone is 5000mAh battery. The company says that the battery gives more than 2 days of usage and it also supports OTG, which means you can charge other devices as well. The battery surely looks promising and provided the type of display and Chipset Smartron has opted for, it could give a good battery backup. Lastly, on the connectivity front, the device features 4G LTE, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 4.1, FM Radio, GPS, 3.5mm audio jack, USB OTG, and a MicroUSB 2.0 port.