By Ali Pardiwala | Updated: 24 July 2015 18:43 IST
Competition in the budget smartphone market is heating up quicker than
an overclocked processor in a frying pan. The most excitement is happening in the sub-Rs. 15,000 price bracket. Brands such as Xiaomi,
Motorola, Yu Televentures, Micromax and a handful of small-name
upstarts are battling furiously for your money.
Not one to be
left out, Lava Mobiles' premium brand Xolo is making its presence felt
with the Rs. 12,999 Xolo Black. As the name suggests, it is only available in
one colour, and there are no prizes for guessing which. It's well specified,
has some quirky features such as dual cameras and a front flash, and tries very hard to scream 'premium'. But the market is a cutthroat and
unpredictable place, so Xolo has its work cut out for it. We find out if it has
what it takes in our review.
Look and feel The Xolo Black
bears an uncanny resemblance to the Sony Xperia Z3 (Review | Pictures), thanks to its curved
edges and matte-finished metal frame. Where most of the competition
(including the similarly priced Xiaomi Mi4i) uses polycarbonate as the
material for the body, the Xolo Black uses glass. Both the front and
back panels are toughened Corning Gorilla Glass, which should help in
keeping them scratch-free. They're also incredibly
reflective and are grime magnets, so you'll find that you need to wipe the
phone clean quite often.
The 5.5-inch full-HD screen makes up a
little over 69 percent of the front of the Xolo Black, with narrow side bezels and a bit more space on the top and bottom. There are off-screen
soft keys below the screen, which we feel are too small and too widely spaced. These stay dark by default until pressed. This makes them a bit tricky to
use, and we often found ourselves tapping on dead space. The
front camera and its dedicated flash are in the two top corners of the
front, while the earpiece occupies a small portion of the top-middle.
The
back of the device has the Xolo and Hive branding, along with the
dual-camera setup. The two lenses are placed symmetrically on either side of the
rear flash. The metallic edge wraps around the device smoothly, with the
charging port and speakers at the bottom, and the 3.5mm headset socket at
the top.
The SIM tray is on the left and holds both SIM cards,
while the power and volume buttons are on the right. An annoying trend
that we've been seeing now finds its way to the
Xolo Black: the second SIM slot doubles up as the microSD card card
slot, which means you have to choose between dual-SIM functionality and more storage. We don't believe there is any good reason that anyone should
be forced to make that choice.
The power button doubles up
as a status light, which we found a bit strange. This means that
you can't see that you have new notifications unless the Xolo
Black is facing you at a specific angle, which somewhat defeats the purpose of having the light. A traditional notification
light at the front of the device would have made much more sense.
On
the whole, it's a well built and smartphone that stands out next to its competition and feels more premium than its price tag of Rs. 12,999 would suggest.
Specifications and Software The Xolo Black uses the
extremely popular Qualcomm Snapdragon 615 (2nd Gen) SoC, which means it supports 4G. Fortunately, it is compatible with band 40, so the
phone can be used for 4G services from Indian operators. The 5.5-inch
display has a full-HD resolution, with a pixels-per-inch count of 401.
The Xolo Black also features 2GB RAM, 16GB of internal storage (with support for up to 32GB microSD cards), and a 3,200mAh Lithium-polymer
battery. The rear camera setup features two sensors; a
13-megapixel primary camera and a 2-megapixel secondary unit. The front
camera uses a 5-megapixel sensor, and both the front and back have their
own flashes.
Android Lollipop 5.0.2 powers the Xolo Black,
with the company's proprietary Hive user interface layered on top.
Hive is an attractive UI for the most part, with a handful of features
and tweaks that aren't available on other devices in the
price range. The app drawer is different, for one, and sorts apps
horizontally by category. You can sort by alphabet, time of installation
or app category, which is a good way to differentiate from the typical
app drawer that we're used to.
Hive itself is sometimes a bit slow
for our liking. It's occasionally sluggish in loading screens, and its
animations take too long to play through. Most of the time, it does work
well, so we can't complain too much. The default Hive lock screen is
terrible, with very little appeal to it. Luckily, it can be disabled and
replaced with the stock Android lock screen. The stock option also lets
you customise quick launch keys and displays notifications
without you having to unlock the device, so it's the obvious choice here.
All
in all, it's a better user interface that what most other manufacturers
offer. It's heavily customisable with plenty of tweaks and settings for
the user to play with. The Xolo Black also has a handful of useful preinstalled apps,
including McAfee, Comet Browser and a few Hive-branded security and
privacy tools. The preinstalled apps unfortunately can't be removed, but
they aren't too heavy on the phone's resources and can be stopped from the app settings menu and then ignored.
Camera The
Xolo Black interestingly uses a dual-camera setup on the rear. This comprises of a 13-megapixel primary sensor and a
2-megapixel secondary sensor. This is meant to improve autofocus speed and also let you refocus on different parts of the picture
after it has been taken, similar to the HTC One (M8)'s dual-camera feature. Autofocus is a bit quicker than we've noticed on most other similarly priced smartphones,
but not significantly so. The refocusing feature works well, but is
still essentially a gimmick that won't be put to use very often by most
people.
A couple of other camera features of note are OptiZoom and
ChromaFlash. OptiZoom aims to improve the quality of zoomed in images,
but does not actually do much. Digitally zoomed
images are grainy as always. ChromaFlash involves capturing two
images in quick succession; one with the flash
and one without. The frames are then combined by the software to create
a single image that tones down the effect of the flash for improved
realism. This works surprisingly well; images came out a
fair bit better than what we've seen from similar smartphones in terms of
colour and brightness.
(Click for full-size image)
The camera itself is decent, taking
pictures that are sharp, detailed and fairly vibrant. Whites have a
tendency to appear too bright, so pictures with a lot of white tend to
lose some detail. The front camera is a standard
5-megapixel shooter, but interestingly has its own flash. Selfie
lovers will be pleased with this, since it significantly improves shots
taken in dark places. It's reasonable to say that snap-happy users will
be pleased with the cameras on the Xolo Black.
The camera software is easy to use and features all the settings and modes that you'd
ordinarily want from a smartphone. However, there are two apps for the
camera; the ordinary one that features a bunch of filters and settings
modes, and the dual-camera app which utilises the 2-megapixel secondary
sensor but does away with a lot of the features that the main app offers. This
turned out to be very confusing for us, since taking a picture now
additionally involved making a decision as to which app's features would be better for
the picture we intended to take. It would have been better to have the
dual-camera mode worked into the standard app, and we're hoping a future
firmware update fixes this.
Performance Performance is decent on the Xolo Black, with the device handling most
tasks well. Hive UI is a little sluggish at times, but this
doesn't affect performance in apps and games. We had no serious
concerns with the phone during our time with it; the Black ran smoothly
and had no malfunctions or crashes of any sort. Voice call quality was
standard, as was performance with audio using both headphones and the
device's own speakers.
We also put the Black through our
assortment of HD videos. The device ran most of them with ease, and
had file format issues with some of the others. We played Sonic Runners
on the phone and felt no lag or performance issues whatsoever.
Multitasking would tend to slow the phone down a little bit, so it's
advisable not to keep too many apps running at the same time. The
display, while full-HD and suitably sharp, is a little weak in terms of
colour and contrast. It certainly isn't the cleanest full-HD display
we've seen on a smartphone.
The Xolo Black
scored 32,519 in AnTuTu and 20,996 in Quadrant. We also ran 3D Mark Ice
Storm Extreme and GFXBench, where the phone scored 5427 points and 14fps
respectively. This is more or less on par with other Snapdragon 615
devices. The battery lasted 9 hours, 41 minutes during our video loop
battery test, which is a bit low for device with a 3,200mAh battery. In day
to day use, the battery lasted a whole day with ease.
Verdict The
Xolo Black is essentially a no-fuss smartphone with slightly above-average capabilities. It performs on par with most
other devices in its price range, looks decent, and has a couple of
features that stand out. Its dual rear cameras, front flash and
generally pleasing performance with photography do help distinguish it in a way.
We like this phone, and we think you'll like too. If
you're looking for a decent phone that does its job, and don't want to
spend a lot of money, the Xolo Black is definitely one to consider.
It's available on Flipkart now.
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