XOLO Prime Review

XOLO announced their budget smartphone the XOLO prime few weeks back. This is one of the few budget smartphones below Rs 6000 running Android 5.0 Lollipop. The phone comes with a 4.5 inch FWVGA IPS LCD display and is powered by a 1.3 Ghz Quad core Mediatek chipset with 1GB RAM and also comes with 8GB internal storage. The internal storage is expandable via microSD Card.

The phone also has 5MP rear camera with LED flash and a front facing VGA camera. It also has dual SIM support with 3G and 1800mAh battery. Here is the detailed review of the device.

Here is the video review of XOLO Prime.

Design and Build:

One of the speciality of this budget phone is the variety of colors in comes in. XOLO Prime is available in four exciting colors of Black, Blue, Red and Gold along with a glass finish back. The build quality of the phone is pretty good for a budget device. The curved edges and the flat black panel gives it a decent design. The power and volume buttons are located on the right side while the micro USB charging slot and 3.5 mm audio jack is located at the top. The glass finished rear panel is removable and houses the 5MP rear camera with LED flash and the speaker located at the bottom.

The front panel has a the 4.5inch display, three capacitive buttons and the usual sensors along with front camera. Overall, the design and build quality looks decent for a budget smartphone.

Display:

The phone comes with a 4.5 inch FWVGA display which has a resolution of 854 X 480 which is pretty low. While quite a lot of devices in the budget category have moved to qHD or HD displays, XOLO has sticked to FWVGA IPS LCD panel. While the display quality is slightly better than what is being offered by Micromax in similar priced devices, you can still see the pixelation on the display. The colors look decent, but the sharpness levels are low.

The touch response seems ok and there was no issues. The brightness levels of the display was slightly lower, but decent for use indoors. But overall, the display was just average.

Software:

XOLO prime comes with Android 5.0 Lollipop out of the box and the UI is mostly stock Android. There isn’t much of customizations from the company and it looks and feels like stock experience. The notifications center is also the same as stock, no changes. The phone does not feature any bloatwares and this is one good aspect about the device.

The phone has app drawer with the white background.

UI is mostly responsive and we seldom faced any lags or issues. Multi tasking is also implemented the Lollipop way again no changes here. The phone does not feature any additional tools or support for gestures like the Micromax Unite 3 we reviewed recently.

The phone has file manager, FM radio, Backup and restore and few other apps included. If you like stock experience, XOLO prime should be good device in terms of the experience.

Performance:

The XOLO prime is powered by a 1.3Ghz Mediatek Quad Core processor with 1GB RAM. The phone also comes with 8GB internal storage out of which around 4.9GB is user available. You can also expand the storage via micro SD card. You can also install apps on the SD card by choosing the default write disk as SD card.

The performance of the device was decent for day to day tasks, but isn’t too good when you push it to the corner with multiple apps running in the background. While the performance was lag free with few apps running in the background, it became laggy when you run heavy RAM consuming apps in the background as the device has just 1GB of RAM.

The gaming experience on the device was pretty average and not suited for heavy and graphic rich games especially with the low resolution display.

The call quality on the device was good and we never experienced any call drops and the signal strength was good. The rear speaker performance was decent, but the output wasn’t the best when you increase the volume. The phone comes with dual SIM card and support for 3G.

Camera:

The phone comes with 5MP rear camera with flash and a front facing 5MP camera. The camera on the Prime is one of the disappointing aspects of the phone. While most of the budget phones have moved to 8MP camera as default, XOLO managed only 5MP sensor on this device.

The camera interface on XOLO prime is typical of most budget phones running on Mediatek chipset. There is also 1080p recording available on the phone. The photos taken with the rear 5MP camera was below average and the quality was poor. The colors looked completely washed out and the photos were blurry as well. Even the daylight photos had high amount of noise. The low light photos were again noisy and you cannot expect great low light performance from a 5MP sensor. The flash performance was decent. The video recording was again disappointing with poor color quality. The VGA front facing camera is just for taking some selfies for social sharing. Here are some of the photos taken with the device.

Battery Life:

The phone packs a 1800mAh battery and the capacity is low when compared to most of the budget smartphones which come with atleast 2000mAh capacity. The battery performance was just average and if you are heavy user, you might have to charger the battery more than once. But for an average user, you can squeeze it a day of usage with the battery.

Verdict:

XOLO Prime is priced Rs 5500 and is available in online and retail stores across India. What XOLO Prime provides for the price is decent stock Android experience with some colorful rear panels. If you are on a tight budget, XOLO Prime is a decent buy at 5.5k, but if you can extend the budget we would suggest buying the Redmi 2 or the Lenovo A6000 Plus which are around the 7k price point.