XOLO Q800 Review

The cold war in the smartphone arena is in full swing to determine the fastest phone on a budget price. Manufacturers currently seem busy trying to flaunt their quad-core Android handsets with the best spec sheet possible to impress the Indian consumer. But what these phones lack is possibly the trust of the Indian consumer in the state of the after-sales service. Nevertheless, leaving aside the after-sales angle, are these phones really worth considering or not is left up to the consumer himself. And it is the consumer who decides whether the handset suits his needs and performs as per his/her expectations. We recently saw the Gionee Dream D1 quad-core handset with the best feature-set and the lowest cost yet available. WickedLeak and Micromax are also not too far behind with their quad core variants. XOLO, another known manufacturer, has recently released a new quad-core handset—the Q800. Does the Q800 have something better than the rest? Let’s take a look.

4.5-inch IPS display with qHD resolution (960 x 540 pixels)

Design and build quality
The XOLO Q800, a product from LAVA International Ltd, is packed in a rugged and firm plastic chassis. The entire shell has a rubberised finish with a shiny brown trim around it. The front panel is complete glass with three capacitive buttons for Home, Back and Menu on the bottom side while the top highlights the speaker, front camera and the earpiece. The rear panel sports the main shooter with an LED flash and the speaker grille is visible at the bottom. The top has the 3.5 mm audio jack and the microUSB PC interface while the power button and the volume rocker are placed on the right side. Snap open the rear panel and you will find the two SIM card slots along with a hot-swappable microSD card slot beneath it. The entire phone has a good grip and the 4.5-inch display is just sufficient enough for single-handed use—not too large, not too small.

8MP camera with LED flash, matte-finish rear panel

Features
The XOLO Q800 has powerful hardware under the hood. It runs on the MT6589 SOC which features a quad-core 1.2GHz processor coupled with a PowerVR SGX544 GPU and 1GB of RAM. The display is a sufficiently large 4.5-inch IPS panel, but sports a resolution of just 960 x 540 pixels. We did see the Gionee Dream D1 sporting a Super HD AMOLED resolution display panel with Gorilla Glass 2 on the exact same hardware. This could be one reason for the price difference of almost Rs 4,000 between the two. Moving on, the internal storage is the same as with all budget handsets we have witnessed in the past. It stays at 4GB, which can be expanded up to 32GB using a microSD card.

Dual SIM GSM+WCDMA, 2100 mAh battery

The rear shooter is 8MP with LED flash and is capable of capturing full HD 1080p videos. The front camera is 1MP for video chats over Wi-Fi or 3G. The handset is dual SIM compatible with support for either two GSM SIM cards or one GSM and one WCDMA SIM card for 3G Internet. Sensors present within are for 3-axis accelerometer, proximity, light, magnetic 3-axis and gyroscope. The XOLO Q800 runs on Android Jelly Bean v4.1 operating system; it can be updated to v4.2 when the manufacturer is ready to release it. Lastly, the handset is fuelled by a 2100 mAh battery.

Power and volume rocker on the right side

Performance
We tested the Q800 using the standard benchmarking apps to check its core performance and the potential of the hardware within. AnTuTu scored 12997, Quadrant scored 2643 while NenaMark2 scored 53.2 fps. Linpack gave us scores of 37.2 MFLOPS and 126.1 MFLOPS in the single-thread and multi-thread tests respectively. According to the scores we received, the handset does not perform any better than other similar budget quad-core handsets in the category.