iBall Cobalt Solus offers a simple design, light weight, decent camera and specs.
By Mohd Ujaley
In recent months, many Chinese and home-grown smartphone makers have launched 4G enabled affordable smartphones in the market. In fact, a lot of action is happening in the affordable smartphone segment in the country. And, the recent one to enter into the race is Best IT World. The Mumbai headquartered company has launched its first 4G enabled handset—iBall Cobalt Solus. Priced at Rs 11,999, the device offers simple design, light weight, decent camera and specs. But will it be enough for the users? To understand it, let us look into the device.
Out of the box, the first thing you notice about iBall Cobalt Solus is its simple design and light weight. The front is dominated by 5-inch screen with IPS HD lamination display with a screen resolution of 1280 x 720 pixels and 294 ppi. The display quality has been fairly satisfactory and it is at par with any Android device in this price range. You can read in direct sunlight and also Android Lollipop’s adaptive display works fine indoors. Front is also home to a 3.5 mm headset jack and front camera on the top while there are three capacitive touch keys in the bottom. The detachable rear panel is home to Cobalt branding in the centre, along with rear camera and LED flash at the top and a speaker grille at the edge of the bottom. The power and volume rocker keys are placed at the right edge while the left is completely free from any distraction.
The iBall Cobalt Solus runs on Android 5.1 Lollipop and its entrails are powered by 1 GHz quad-core 64 bit processor and Mali graphic core coupled with 2 GB RAM. During the review period, the device worked without any hiccup. While doing multitasking or switching between the apps, there was no serious lag to write about. In fact, the device handled some of the graphics intensive games quite smoothly. The phone has 16 GB of internal memory for storage of which about 11 GB is available for general use.
On the camera front, Cobalt Solus comes with a 13-megapixel auto focus LED flash rear camera and a 8-megapixel front camera with flash and BSI sensor. Both the cameras are decent and take pictures with average quality and fine details in regular light. Overall, the device is a good performer in camera section and specially if you are selfie-freak, this could be your phone.
The device is packed with a replaceable 2,000mAh battery. The overall performance of the battery has been at par with any other Android device in this price range. It has decent standby time and could last between 5-7 hours with multitasking and continuous data usage. The company could have offered more powerful battery especially at a time when above 2500mAh is becoming the standard.
If you are looking for a decent budget 4G enabled smartphone with maximum specifications, iBall Cobalt Solus could be a good option because it offers a simple design, light weight, decent camera and specs. For a week, I used this phone, it handled everything smoothly without any lag.
SPECIFICATIONS
* Display: 5 inch, 1280 x 720 pixels
* Processor: Quad core 1 Ghz Cortex A53 advanced processor
* Operating system: Android 5.1 Lollipop
* Memory & storage: 2 GB RAM + 16 GB internal storage
* Camera: 8 MP front; 13 MP rear
* SIM type: Dual SIM
* Battery: 2000mAh, replaceable
* Estimated street price: Rs 11,999