Videocon Mobile had a couple of weeks back announced two new Android smartphones, called the A30 and the A20. Out of the two, Videocon A30 is the costlier handset which comes with Dual SIM feature and Android 4.0 operating system. It has a 4 inch screen with WVGA (800 x 480 pixels) resolution and a 1 GHz dual core Qualcomm Scorpion processor.
Videocon A30, also has a 5 megapixel rear camera with LED flash and a front facing VGA camera. A 1500 mAh battery powers the phone which is priced at Rs 7,700. Here is our review of the Videocon A30’s performance.
Design
Videocon A30 has nothing special in terms of design. It has an all-black front and a white coloured back panel which is shiny and thus is a bit slippery. The 5 megapixel camera sits in the top middle portion flanked by an LED flash in the rear panel. The Videocon logo is at the bottom, slightly above the speaker grill.
In the A30, Videocon has placed the power button on the top towards the left side, instead of the usual right hand top side. Since the phone is small in size, the placement is not an issue, but the 3.5 mm jack is placed on the right of the power/lock button, which makes it a bit awkward to unlock the phone while using the headphone. However it is not a deal breaker anyways. The volume rocker is on the top-left side.
It has a dual SIM smartphone in which both the SIMS are active( one can use both the SIMs)and alongside there is slot for micro SD card. Thankfully, one need not to remove the battery to access memory slot as it is a hot swappable one (which does not require the phone to be shut down while inserting or removing the SD card).
The four capacitive touch buttons below the screen are all back lit. Having four buttons point to the fact that phone was designed for Android 2.3 but Android 4.0 was ported to it. This though is no drawback as it allows all the functions Android 4.0 except for that fact that you will have to long press the home button to see all the running apps; in case of three button design, it is a one touch affair.
Overall, build quality of the phone is good but shiny plastic cover doesn’t exude class.
Display
Videocon A30 has a multi-touch, four inch display with 800×480 pixel resolution. This is a standard set of resolution that you get with most budget 7 inch tablets and 5 inch phones. Since the A30 has a smaller screen, the Pixel density looks good; colour reproduction and sharpness are fine as well.
Though not an IPS panel, the display of Videocon A30 offers decent viewing angles. The screen is quite bright too which aids visibility in brighter environments and even in bright sunlight you can operate the phone without much difficulty.
The touch sensitivity is slightly lower than many other phones, but it’s just a bit lower and nothing much to complain. It is only while playing games that you will realise its slow response.
Performance
The phone is based on Qualcomm dual core Scorpion processor, clocked at 1 GHz and is coupled with 512 MB RAM and Adreno 220 graphics processor. While the combination should have produced a result, but it fails to impress; sometimes the phone gets slow and also hangs at times. At times, even calling application hangs. Curiously though, it manages to play decent graphics intensive games like Temple Run.
Videocon A30 offers about 1 GB of internal storage which is decent amount of space to store many applications. Since apps stored on flash memory (internal memory) works better than when placed on external memory, this is plus point of A30.
Camera
The Videocon A30 comes with a 5 megapixel camera at the back, which manages to click some decent pictures in well-lit environments, but in low light, the camera is not up to the mark and even the LED flash is of not much use. The one touch auto focus of the camera does work well.
There is a front camera as well which is of VGA resolution and is good only for video chats and provides very average performance.
Connectivity
As far as connectivity is concerned we faced issues with inconsistent call quality and call drops. While most of the times the network works just fine, but this phone seems to drop the network more often than other phones.
WiFi reception and Bluetooth has no such issues.
Battery
Videocon A30 has a 1500 mAH battery which is quite common to smartphones in this price bracket. During our tests, the phone offered very poor battery back-up and WiFi usage seemed to drain the battery very rapidly, more rapidly than in other phones.
So much so that when we used the handset by keeping its WiFi on, the A30 lost 60 per cent of its battery charge. Without WiFi however battery does support a full day of usage.
Competition
The Videocon A30 competes directly with Karbonn A11 and Lava Iris N400. While Iris is priced slightly cheaper than A30, it lacks on Internal Memory (just 150 MB), while Karbonn A11 has 2 GB internal storage but is slightly more expensive (Rs 200 more).
Verdict
A company like Videocon should have brought a product with a difference to the market to get back in the Android space.
While there are issues with the device like battery drain while WiFi is on and performance related issues, it might be an issue with the particular unit we have. Moreover most of the device in this price bracket doesn’t offer much either in terms of performance.
In a nutshell, there is nothing lacking in A30 and the handset competes well with its immediate competition, but at the same time, it doesn’t offer anything special to the consumer that Videocon should have offered on its comeback device.