Coolpad Note 3 First Impressions: A budget smartphone with an impressive fingerprint scanner

Chinese smartphone company, Coolpad is a relatively new company in India but is quite aggressive in its approach towards making space for itself in the already crowded smartphone market. The company Thursday launched the Note 3 smartphone to join in others in the sub-Rs 10,000 category in India.

The company says that this phone does is not here to simply become a part of the crowd. This is a feature-rich smartphone that will stand out due to its impressive set of specifications that are rare to a smartphone priced for Rs 8,999.

PROS

• Fingerprint scanner
• 3GB RAM

CONS

• non removable battery
• Nothing new in design

The major highlight of the Note 3 is that it adorns a fingerprint scanner, which gives it an edge over others in this price range. Moreover, features like 4G connectivity, 13MP camera, HD display, octa-core chipset, 3GB RAM, Android Lollipop and more make it a rather powerful offering in the market. With all these features and specs on board, the smartphone is capable of disrupting the market and set a trend for other brand in India.

We have spent some time with the phone, and here are our first impressions.

Design and display

The Coolpad Note 3 dons plastic chassis, which is standard for phones in this range. The phone is comfortable and offers a good grip on hand. It does not exactly look anything that we have not seen before but does not event look that boring. The phone comes with a removable back panel design with a chrome-finished strip running across the sides. The company has designed the front in a way that it seems to have an edge to edge running screen, and it is only when you wake the display that you notice thick bezels on sides of the screen.

As for the display quality, the 5.5-inch HD screen offers 720x1280 pixels resolution reproduces colors well, and offer good viewing angles. The touch interface works smoothly, but the display is a fingerprint magnet.

The front has a front-facing camera, a 5.5-inch display and three capacitive keys placed below the screen. The left and right had sides accommodate power key and volume rocker respectively. The top has 3.5mm audio jack and the bottom has a USB port. The rear panel flaunts a 13MP camera with flash, fingerprint sensor placed below it, Coolpad branding and speakers. The back panel is removable, but sadly the battery is non-removable.

Processor

The Coolpad Note 3 is powered by a Mediatek MT6753 octa-core processor with 3GB of RAM and 16GB of storage, which can be expanded further using microSD card. The processor seems promising but we will reserve our opinion on the performance for our detailed review of the phone.

Camera:

The phone sports a 13MP rear camera with LED flash, and a 5MP front-facing camera for selfie lovers. The camera gets support of an array of features and modes including HDR, gesture based shot and more.

The camera worked fine during our test, and we noticed that the photos lacked sharpness. The front facing camera worked well. Wait for our review of the phone soon to know more about camera performance.

Fingerprint scanner:

Considering that the fingerprint scanner is the main highlight of the phone, we tried using it. Surprisingly, the sensor works brilliantly.It worked quite well for us and recognized finger impressions quickly, in single try every time we used it. The phone is capable of storing up to five fingerprints. You can save fingerprint impressions to unlock the screen, quickly capture a photo, one key dial and open other apps. You will need to allot different impression for each of them.

Software:

The smartphone runs Android 5.1 Lollipop topped with Cool 6.0 UI. The company claims that they have added India centric features in the UI for mass appeal in India. overall, the UI and software interface looked smooth, though more can be said only after we review the device.

Conclusion:

The CoolPad note 3 packs in good features and specifications that make it look a better phone than others in this space. This dual-SIM smartphone will appeal to those customers who are looking for a spec-heavy smartphone with 4G compatibility. However, whether it will fare well in the market or not will depend on its performance as well as other factors.