Intex Technologies had owned a team in the IPL 2016 cricket league in India this year. Being a smartphone brand, you expect it to do something exclusive, just like how the campaigns from VIVO and OPPO happened during the IPL and ICC World T20 respectively. Intex didn’t just promote a phone or the brand, but also launched a phone that was dedicated to the name of the team it owned – Intex Aqua Lions 3G, named after the Gujarat Lions team.
Not that the phone is packed with good specs. It isn’t, but it isn’t a phone that the company might expect everyone to get interested in. The Intex Aqua Lions 3G is targeted at the fans of the team that did fairly well at their first tournament, but is the phone relating to the performance?
To run through the specs, the Aqua Lions 3G has a 5-inch HD display, a Spreadtrum SC7731 quad-core chipset along with Mali-400MP GPU and 1GB of RAM, 8GB of internal storage and the device runs Android 5.1 Lollipop OS. The camera combination too seems quite basic, but one of the highlights of the phone is its 3500 mAh battery, which is a good capacity for the price.
The phone is sturdy and good with the build, though it is the plastic used with a smooth rubbery finish on the back. It is a no-nonsense design with a simple look, the MicroUSB port and the 3.5mm headset jack on the top, a small speaker grill on the bottom, and the right frame having the physical buttons.
The whole display is used for the content and thus, the navigation buttons are in the bottom, outside the in. These buttons don’t light up. The display is just decent but Intex managed to pack an HD display, so you at least can play some good HD content to take advantage of it. Otherwise, the readability is not very good and one would struggle to read anything under the sunlight even on the highest brightness. If not the quality, the display sometimes gives issues with its touchscreen. There are issues of the display losing your touch or drag and that affects the experience.
No matter what smartphone brand it is, if the chipset used it from one of the makers who is not very well known, there are certain doubts about its performance. Having a quad-core 1.3GHz chipset from Spreadtrum, the Intex Aqua Lions 3G does not really disappoint if you are a basic user starting off with Android or have used a similarly priced product earlier, but for users who expect more and some mid-range games to do well on it, you are expecting overly.
As for the UI, it is the Android 5.1 Lollipop OS being run on the device and as expected, there are some pre-installed apps including the Gujarat Lions app, Auto Call Record, Backup and Restore, APKHide, FM Radio, follo, Freecharge, Amazon India, Hike, I Store, Intex Service, Intex Store, NewsHunt, OLX, Opera Mini, RobinHood, Saavn, Sound Recorder, and the Google Play apps that usually come in as a bundle.
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The UI isn’t too basic, because Intex has made sure that some gesture features are in place for quick actions – Up slip to turn screen on and unlock, Down slip to play or pause music, left and right slip to shift between songs, and drawing certain alphabets to quickly open apps directly from the lock screen.
SOS / Emergency function – This is quite a helpful one, where pressing the power button five times activates an emergency feature and SMS is automatically sent to three recipients that you set. Once they receive the SMS and call you, the phone wouldn’t ring and it will be picked up automatically.
There’s a Power saving function powered by the Battery Master and here, you will find the timeline showing releasing of memory, the extension of standby time, etc. and you can set the device to enter the hibernate mode. Other useful features include the batch uninstallation of apps, setting up of audio profiles, etc.
The Intex Aqua Lions 3G has got 18344 on AnTuTu benchmark, 5187 in Quadrant Standard edition, 1155 in Vellamo Multi-core test, and 47.0 fps in the Nenamark2 test.
The camera is as expected, not really good but decent for the 5-megapixel lens. The camera app gives options of toggling between Panorama, Camera, and Video, and in the Settings, one can change the capture resolution. The camera takes time to focus in any light conditions and on low-light areas, it fails to focus properly on any object. The captures aren’t appreciable in quality except when taken in broad daylight.
Check the camera samples: Link
The highlight of the phone is its battery, the 3500 mAh power that was able to deliver easily over a day’s usage. It has a great standby, and when using the phone for a long time on Wi-Fi, it does not show any excessive drain at all. If someone wants a secondary phone with a good battery life and with no big budget in the hand, the battery on this is really good.
As the name itself suggests, the Aqua Lions 3G supports 3G connectivity and it is a Dual SIM phone. The call quality was decent and the 3G connectivity was swift, though Wi-Fi isn’t too strong in reception.
Final Verdict
There are times when you care about the brand, care about the service and a lot of other things while purchasing a phone. But here, the Intex Aqua Lions 3G was targeted at a certain set of buyers when it was launched. Though, for someone looking to get a phone that keeps itself on for a good time and is decent enough for making and receiving calls, the phone is a good deal.
Also, you are not going to see anything that is specifically showing this as a phone in a collaboration with Gujarat Lions IPL team, so it is just like any other Android phone with decent specs for the price. Although not for heavy users expecting a good performance, the phone is a decent deal if you don’t want to use it heavily.
