Intex Aqua Ace Review
Look and Design
intex aqua ace The design matches Sony’s products to a great extent, a little bit of Apple’s look has also been added. Metallic rim has been used on the edge of the phone. When I held the handset for the first time, I realized that it was light. Its entire body is made of plastic. However, this handset does not give the feeling of being complete by any means.
The white and gold variant received for review looks decent, but is not at all attention-grabbing.
Micro-USB port has been placed at the top. Next to it is a 3.5 mm audio socket. It appears that there are two speaker grills at the bottom of the handset, although only one of them is a speaker. The second is the design element. The power and volume buttons are on the right, although they’re a little lower for our liking. MicroSD card tray has also been given space on this side. At the same time, there is another tray on the left side which is for two micro-SIM cards.
The front and back panels are made with the help of Gorilla Glass 3. We were disappointed with the metallic rim around the edge of the handset, as scratch marks became visible within a day or two of normal use.
We would suggest you use the flip cover that comes with this handset, I wish it was a little prettier.
Specifications
Intex has used the latest 1.3 GHz quad-core MediaTek MT6735 processor in it. The company heavily promoted that the handset is equipped with 3 GB of RAM which is revolutionary for this price range. Inbuilt storage is 16 GB out of which 10 GB is available to the user. The good thing is that it has support for microSD card up to 128 GB. It comes with USB-OTG feature.
For some reason Intex has used an AMOLED panel of 720×1280 pixels which is not great for a 5 inch screen in this price range. The screen is a bit dim and it becomes very difficult to read anything on it in sunlight. You will immediately realize that its screen is weaker than expected.
There is support for LTE (Band 40). Other common connectivity features are also present in the handset. The rear camera has a 13-megapixel sensor and the front camera is 5-megapixel. The battery is 2300 mAh.
The Aqua Ace smartphone comes with Android 5.1 and the company has not customized it much. The default icon is very bad looking. We had trouble using the custom keyboard given in it. We disabled it immediately.
performance
We have already said that we did not like the screen of Intex Aqua Ace much. It’s fine for most tasks, but we’ve seen better screens at this price. We had a problem with the phone getting hot. This was happening even when no major work was being done on the device. At times it became difficult to hold the handset in hands. One strange thing that happened was that this phone had trouble finding 4G networks in many areas whereas other phones were doing so easily.
We found that there were occasional problems playing 720 pixel video files. Video files of 1080 pixels play with many shortcomings. The performance of the inbuilt speaker was very poor, the sound was not clear even at low volume levels. The headphones that come with the handset are fine for voice calls but not at all suitable for music. The benchmark test results were good.
The camera disappointed the most. Photos taken in daylight showed poor focus and poor focus on most occasions. Details were completely missing and there was a strange artificiality to every picture. Close-up shots also point towards the poor performance of the camera. Photos taken inside the house were even worse.
On the other hand, what surprised us the most was the battery performance. The battery lasted 10 hours and 14 minutes in the video loop test. Given the battery capacity, we were expecting a poor result.
our decision
Intex has heavily promoted that this handset has 3GB of RAM which is revolutionary for a handset at this price. Honestly, it doesn’t matter. We would have liked the handset to have a better display and build quality. We were skeptical about the battery life of the phone, but the performance surprised us.
All things considered, we believe that Intex has so far failed to find the right formula. There are much better phones available in the market for this price or even less. The one with big display lenovo k3 note (review), Xiaomi Mi 4i (review) and Motorola Moto G (Gen 3) (Review) included.
