Lava Iris X1 Grand Review: A Budget Phone with Good Battery Life

Lava Iris X1 is a promising smartphone under the Rs. 10,000 segment but is not upto the mark for the competitor who are present in the market in the same price range. The Lava X1 Grand runs on Android Kitkat 4.4.2 but it couldn't make any fame for itself as Motorola's Moto E stole the spotlight in the Indian market and got appreciated by many. But the Iris X1 Grand has slightly better features than the Moto E on paper.

So how good is the Lava Iris X1 Grand? Can it exceed the high expectations set by the Moto E? Take a look at our review and do share your thoughts with us about Lava Iris X1 Grand in the comment box below.

Build Quality And Design:

Lava Iris X1 looks like a cheap knockoff for the iPhone 4S and there is no doubt in that. The device is not sleek but can be considered as bulky, but it can be operated with one hand. However, sometimes the smooth metal around the sides made it slip from my hands quite often. On the paper, the phone measures around 9mm and weighs comfortably at 138g.

PROS

• Good Battery Life
• Less Bloatware

CONS

• Average Display
• Ordinary Camera
• Device Lags

On the sides of 4.5-inch LCD screen there are sensors, there's 3.5mm jack and front-facing camera has been placed in a custom format. The bezel is slim enough, and one can find capacitive buttons for navigtion below the display. They only light up when are touched upon, otherwise they are invisible. This could bother many to find the navigation buttons, especially when we are in a hurry.

Further, the Lava X1 Grand is made out of plastic, but the enforcemnet of metal rims along the side of the device is great for a smartphone in this price range. Atleast better than Samsung or HTC!

Photo Courtesy - Upendra Kagalgomb

The back panel has a classy gradient pattern design and it can be removed as well. Once removed a user can see the battery, a microSD card slot and a dual-Sim card slot (1 Micro and 1 Mini).

Display:

The 4.5-inch IPS display sports a resolution of 854 x 480, which is lower than the qHD resolution on the Moto E. The increased screen size and lower resolution is immediately noticeable when both the devices are compared.

However, the X1 Grand has good viewing angles and colour reproduction is pretty accurate, however, the display lacks sharpness. Images and icons aren't as crisp as we expected and slight colour banding is noticeable in gray backgrounds and videos.

On certain occassions, the sensitivity of the display also seems amiss somewhat. It's not very accurate, especially when you're typing quickly.

Camera:

Lava has packed an 8MP BSI sensor in the Iris X1 Grand which was a bit of dissappointment for me. I had higher expectations from Lava's Iris X1 Grand's camera considering the fact that Lava provides decent cameras in its smartphones.

While taking pictures I had a tough time focusing on my subjects and all test pictures came -- out of focus. After the focus issue was fixed I observed that most of the images lacked detail and were not even crisp.

In addtion, there were signs of purple hues in few shots. Exposure and highlights are not being set properly and it has been stripped off from many features. While, there's also a HDR mode in the phone, however the camera was a bit disappointing part of the phone.

The 2-megapixel front camera jumbles all details to create an image that looks artificial. This issue can be noticed by anyone who looks at the pictures.

Take a look at the sample shots below in both good lighting and average lighting conditions:

Processor and Operating System

The Iris X1 Grand has a Broadcom BCM2355 quad-core processor clocked at 1.2GHz with a Videocore IV GPU. Being a quad core, the Lava Iris X1 performs smoothly in daily use and not so much of lags can be observed while opening apps or when going through the app drawer. Meanwhile, the smartphone is based on Android 4.4.2 Kitkat.

The X1 Grand scored 12,112 and 3,440 respectively in AnTuTu and Quadrant, which is an average number in smartphone ranking.

There is also 1 GB of RAM and this phone was initially launched with 4GB of storage but Lava has changed that to 8GB internal storage post launch and it is available at the same price range. The model we received had 5.93GB of storage out of which 5.61GB is available, far better than Samsung and other premium brands.

Battery:

The 1800mAh battery managed to run for 8-hour with about 17 percent to spare. This means, you should easily be able to get through a full day without having to charge.

Connectivity:

The Lava Iris X1 Grand supports 2G and 3G depending on which slot you insert your card in. You also get Wi-Fi ‘n', Bluetooth v4.0, USB OTG support and GPS. There's no NFC or GLONASS however. We didn't have any issues with call quality on the X1 Grand.

Verdict And Price:

Basically, this handset is a cheap iPhone clone in terms of design at the same time, Iris X1 Grand is also known as the Moto E killer.

The Moto E is priced for Rs. 6,999 where as the Lava Iris X1 Grand was priced at Rs. 7,999. For a thousand bucks more users are getting more features to warrant this bump in price. It has a bigger display, a front facing camera and a much better rear camera with dual LED flash.

In terms of hardware, the X1 and the Moto E are more or less on par, despite the latter only having a dual-core CPU. However, in terms of user experience, the X1 is still no match for the Moto E.

Even though both phones run stock Android KitKat with 1GB RAM, the X1 lags quite a bit in day to day operations. Simple tasks like typing out a message or multi-tasking can get quite sluggish. This is something we never experienced with the Moto E, the reason might be its stock Android UI.

If you want a well built and good looking phone with better features than the Moto E, then the X1 Grans is good option. But remember, that you'll have to live with a bit of sluggishness for some of the simplest tasks.