SMART REVIEW : KARBONN S5 TITANIUM

REVIEW: KARBONN S5 TITANIUM

There has been a flood of budget phablets in the Indian market for the last few months. Every mobile phone maker has come out with
one or the other phablet to tap this increasingly lucrative
smartphone segment. This is not just the case with India, the
entire South Asia seems to be hooked to the large-screen
smartphones, which solve the problem of keeping two devices
at all times.
Like other indigenous mobile phone companies, Karbonn
Mobiles is also not far behind in this trend. The company launched its first budget phablet in the form of S1 Titanium earlier this year and it followed up with
S5 Titanium in March. They have also launched S2 Titanium and S9 Titanium smartphones.
We know we are a bit late in reviewing S5 but as they say, it is
better late than never.
We have seen the entry of full HD or HD display sporting budget phablets in the country in the last
few weeks, so with its considerably humble specifications but decent pricing;
does it make sense to go for S5 Titanium? We will find out in this review.

HARDWARE

Despite the large 5-inch display on-board, Karbonn S5 Titanium
does not feel as heavy as other devices in the same segment. The
slim and curvy design ensures that you can comfortably hold
the phone.
S5 is fully made of glossy plastic and looks nice in hand but both screen and back of the phone are fingerprint magnets. Within minutes of using the phone, you
will see smudges all over the device. The back cover is also
very prone to scratches.
Talking about the specifics, the front of Karbonn S5 Titanium is largely taken by the 5-inch display apart from the ear-piece,
capacitive Android buttons, front camera and sensors. The back is pretty much clean apart from the 8-megapixel rear camera, LED flash and loud-speaker. Volume
rocker and power button are present on each-sides, while the
top houses microUSB port and 3.5mm audio jack. We found the
volume rocker to be too thin and gave a lot of problems during the review period.
Overall, the design and build quality of the phone is decent
and apart from the slim volume rocker and smudge prone body of the phone, we did not face any functional issues.

DISPLAY

Karbonn packs a qHD display on S5 instead of FWGA or WVGA
present in similar priced phablets, which is a good thing.
It might not have the sharpness of an HD display but it still works quite nicely. The colour reproduction is good; however the viewing angles could have
been better.
Although the touch sensitively and multi-touch performance are decent, but we found touch to be
overzealous during scrolling and there are quite a few accidental
taps, which were not desired.

Performance/ Battery Life

Thanks to the presence of 1.2GHz
quad-core Qualcomm
Snapdragon S4 Play MSM8625Q processor
, the overall performance of the
phone is quite snappy. We did not find any lag or jitters during
the normal usage and the even the casual gaming performance
was great. Playing games like Temple Run 2, Angry Birds or
even Dead Trigger is not an issue on the phone.
Coming to the multimedia
performance, the phone plays 720p HD video clips perfectly but it can’t play 1080p full HD.
Speaker is loud enough, however we did find the ear-piece volume slightly low during the calls.
Connectivity options like Wi-Fi and Bluetooth work fine, so does the dual-SIM support.
On the battery front, the phone comes with a 2,000mAh Li-Ion
battery, which packs enough juice to keep the phone powered
throughout a day on medium usage; heavy users might need
to plug-in the phone during the day.

SOFTWARE

Karbonn S5 Titanium runs on almost stock version of Android
4.1.2 out of the box. Being the vanilla version of the stock, the software feels snappy. Karbonn
has made a few tweaks to improve the user experience on the phone including quick
settings in notification shade.
There are some other changes in the UI too, all of them visual but
they don’t add any usefulness to the overall experience.
In terms of the pre-loaded apps,Karbonn has included Kingsoft
Office, TOI app, Whatsapp, and File Manager etc. All of which can be downloaded for free from Google Play, so pre-loading them
does not really add any value apart from the fact that take over
some crucial internal storage space and cannot be un-installed.

Camera

The smartphone packs an 8-megapixel rear camera on-board,
which gives some good outdoor shots during day-light, however during indoor usage; you will
find noise creeping in the images especially when viewed at the full resolution.
The video recording quality is also nice.