Lava has been releasing a steady stream of new smartphones over the past year, with one of its most recent offerings being the Lava Blaze Pro 5G at a price point of Rs 12,999. However, the question arises whether it is the best option available at this price. In our review of the Lava smartphone, we will find out.
Design & Display
With an all-plastic build, the Blaze Pro 5G has an ordinary look and doesn’t stand out in any manner. It comes in two colours out of which we got the starry night shade which is a mixture of black and blue hues.
The colour looks sober. It has a matte finish, which feels fine in the hand. The sides are completely flat and while it’s a big phone, it fits nicely in the hand and the overall grip is good enough.
The buttons are on the right, with the power button doubling as a fingerprint sensor. The sensor, during my review of Lava Blaze Pro 5G, didn’t have any issues in unlocking the phone on the first attempt.
There’s a single speaker at the bottom, which sounds average and isn’t loud enough. However, there’s a 3.5mm Headphone jack so those who prefer wired earphones are in luck.
The front has a 6.78-inch IPS LCD panel that offers an FHD+ Resolution of 1080 x 2460 pixels, 396 PPI and a 120Hz refresh rate. This panel looks decent, with vibrant colours and impressive viewing angles. However, the brightness levels are below par, and you will have difficulty reading and seeing content under harsh sunlight. The smoothness of the scrolling and other actions are on point, thanks to the 120Hz refresh rate.
Performance
The handset draws power from the MediaTek Dimensity 6020 Processor under the hood, paired with 8GB of LPDDR4x RAM, up to 8GB of virtual RAM, and 128 GB of UFS 2.2 storage.
During my review of the Lava Blaze Pro 5G, the handset performed well in day-to-day use. There were minor stutters in system animations, but for the most part, there’s hardly anything to complain about. Talking of animations, their default speed is set to 0.5x so the device can feel snappier.
Even though I changed the animation speed from developer options, the device showed no signs of slowing down. In fact, it felt smoother than before. As for gaming, you cannot expect it to easily run heavy games. But light gaming, including games like Candy Crush, shouldn’t pose any problems.
It runs on Android 13 with some custom elements on top of it. The notification shade and the App drawer are picked up from Stock Android while the Settings app and other features are custom-built.
In the phone, you get a load of features. These features include DuraSpeed for improving app retention in memory and various customisation options such as lock screen clock styles, charging animations, font, colours and more.
There are also a bunch of gestures such as Flip to silent, smart answer for calls, double tap to wake or sleep and more. The phone comes with the August 2023 security patch out of the box, and that’s quite disappointing considering we are currently in October. On the positive side, there are close no third apps pre-loaded on the handset.
Connectivity performance, including connections to 5Ghz Wi-Fi, 5G mobile data, and Bluetooth devices, remained optimum.
Read More: Lava Z4 Plus surfaces online: What to expect?
Battery Life
The Blaze Pro 5G packs a 5,000mAh battery with 33W fast charging. The smartphone can easily run for more than a day with moderate usage including running social media apps, some calling, browsing and watching YouTube.
It got me close to 6 hours of screen-on time with such usage. Pushing it further with heavier use cases will drain the battery before the day ends. Disappointingly, the device takes close to 2 hours to charge from 0 to 100% with the bundled charger.
Cameras
The Lava Blaze Pro 5G packs dual rear cameras including a 50-megapixel primary camera and an AI camera. On the front, it has an 8-megapixel camera.
The camera app has an okay design and is easy to use. The shutter lag is well contained but the camera performance is quite average. The colours look dull, and the dynamic range is below average. The detailing, however, is on the higher side.
Portrait shots have good EDGE detection but the ability to set the intensity of the background blur just didn’t seem to work for me. Again, the detailing is decent, and the colours look much better than what I saw in normal shots.
Selfies from the front-facing camera are not up to the mark. They lack details, are noisy, and have poor dynamic range. It gets drastically blown out if you are in front of a bright background. The colours also look off.
Under artificial lighting and low lighting conditions, the photos become too soft. They don’t have a lot of noise, but the detailing takes a hit.
The device further struggles to take good night shots. Turning on the Night mode cranks up the exposure but the detailing and overall sharpness of the photo remain on the lower levels.
