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| MyPhone Uno: The Micromax Canvas A1 rebrand for the Philippine Android One release. |
Nowadays, almost everyone owns a smartphone. As we all know, a smartphone with a feature-packed experience is kind of pricey. Although cheap smartphones are available and are vast in stock, their experience would unfortunately meet the standards of its price--cheap.
Last year, Google announced its Android One project, which is a set of affordable Nexus-like smartphones, whose target markets are people with small budget, but aims to give them a righteous smartphone experience. Google launched two Android One smartphones here in the Philippines. One of them is the MyPhone Uno, Priced at 4500.00Php. This includes a stock Android 5.1 Lollipop with software updates from Google for 2 years.
BODY AND INTERNALS
Inside, the phone sports Mediatek MT6582 chipset, A Quad-core Cortex A7 with a 1.3 Ghz of clock speed and Mali-400MP2 GPU. Games with intensive graphics will be expected to run fine with this kind of hardware. The phone also has a 4 GB internal storage and can be boosted with microSD card support up to 32 GB.
The front side of the phone screams simplicity. No capacitive keys are found, the speakerphone and the sensors are very subtly put. The only thing to remain is the 4.5 inches screen which will be the first thing you'll notice because of the difference in color with that glass bezels. The screen's lack of black tint somehow contributes to the budget feel of this handset.
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| The front face of the MyPhone Uno |
The front side of the phone screams simplicity. No capacitive keys are found, the speakerphone and the sensors are very subtly put. The only thing to remain is the 4.5 inches screen which will be the first thing you'll notice because of the difference in color with that glass bezels. The screen's lack of black tint somehow contributes to the budget feel of this handset.
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| The back side of the MyPhone Uno. |
As usual, budget smartphones are made from none other than plastic or polycarbonate. Even though it's made of plastic, the feel you get when holding this device is far from cheap; though it doesn't feel premium either. On the top, the 3.5 mm headphone jack can be located, the right side part has the power button and the volume rockers just like any typical smartphone and below is the traditional microUSB port for transferring file to your PC or other devices.
The back side of the phone features the 5-megapixel shooter and an LED flash enclosed in a big faux-metallic circle. On the bottom part, below the Android One branding is where the circular speaker grills can be located. The sound quality is good enough for a normal consumer, although the lack of bass may be noticeable at times.
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| The circular speaker grill and the Android One logo on top. |
The back side of the phone features the 5-megapixel shooter and an LED flash enclosed in a big faux-metallic circle. On the bottom part, below the Android One branding is where the circular speaker grills can be located. The sound quality is good enough for a normal consumer, although the lack of bass may be noticeable at times.
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| Removed back panel revealing some of its internals. |
The MyPhone Uno has a removable back panel that when removed, reveals the Dual SIM slots and an SD card slot. Dual SIM phones is a hit to the masses because of its usability and convenience instead of using another phone for another SIM. The opened back also reveals the 1700mAh battery, which is removable and changeable. The battery lasts for 160 hours on stand-by and 6 hours on talk time.
DISPLAY
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| 4.5 inch IPS LCD Display |
The MyPhone Uno sports a 4.5 inches IPS LCD display with a resolution of 450 x 854. It gives us a 218 ppi which is not that bad on a 4.5 inch screen. Pixels that are noticeable at a short distance away from the screen didn't lessen the quality of watching YouTube or streaming movies. The viewing angles are alright but the screen starts to turn purple if viewed from a diagonal perspective.
CAMERA
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| Lollipop's camera app |
The 5-megapixel shooter is what you will expect from a budget handset. The image quality is good enough for social media usage or if the noise and occasional blurriness doesn't matter to you. The camera also has the capability to record 720p videos. The quality is fair enough but the frame rate is dropping really low at times.
On the other hand, the front facing camera is much worse than the main camera. It's so bad on low-light instances and becomes very blurry when exposed to much light. The 2-megapixel front shooter is what you get for the price of the phone. Both cameras are the main issue or the downside of the handset.
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| Me, testing out the front-facing camera. |
SOFTWARE
The main attraction of the Android One project is its software. MyPhone Uno is running Android 5.1 Lollipop out of the box. This is the release of Android where they introduced Material Design which showcased the new design philosophy of Google. The user interfaces has a uniformity with the flatness of icons and the usage of colors.
The lockscreen of Android Lollipop is really different from its predecessors. Instead of swiping the circle lock, A new swipe-up gesture is used to unlock the phone. To use the dialer while on the lockscreen use the swipe right gesture and swiping to the left launches the camera app.
After unlocking, homescreen is shown. The Google Experience Launcher, which is the default launcher of Google phones and tablets. This launcher is also available in Google Play for Android 4.1 and up. With this launcher, swiping to the far right will reveal the integrated Google Now inside the launcher. It will work just like the one in the Google search.
The notification menu also had a facelift. It now has this clean look to it. Unlike from its past versions, it's not covering the whole screen. New and heavy animations can also be noticed around Lollipop and it's beautiful and unexpectedly smooth because of its limited hardware.
The new Lollipop Material Design also showcases new user interface language such as the color uniformity of the status bar and the action bar which looks really clean and modern.
WRAP-UP
The MyPhone Uno is great for its features and specially for its price. This phone is for people who don't want to spend a lot on a feature-packed smartphone and for first time smartphone buyers who wants to try out the latest in tech. The lastest version of Android running out of the box plus a 2-year support from Google are big assets for this phone and. Despite of the lack of camera quality, this phone is the surely the best phone you can get for an incredible price.
Saturday, April 11, 2015
Reviews
Amazing review!
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