Zopo Speed 7 First Impressions: Yet another Chinese smartphone to join in the crowd!

Chinese smartphone vendor Zopo entered the already crowded smartphone market in India with the launch of its Speed 7 smartphone.The company announced the Speed 7 smartphone for a price of Rs 12,999, and will be selling it in an online only retail model, which is quite a trend these days considering that it is a more cost effective platform for new players in the market. The company will be selling the Speed 7 exclusively on Snapdeal, starting from first week of September.

The Zopo Speed 7 is a mid-range smartphone that has been loaded with attractive features to help it compete its counterparts in the over populated budget and mid-range space. However, the phone will still face a difficult time in the market, considering the soaring competition in this space, and its local rivals that have deeply penetrated in the market.

PROS

• 13-megapixel rear camera
• 3GB of RAM

CONS

• limited 4G LTE compatibility

We got to check out the Speed 7 smartphone at its launch event in Delhi and here are our first impressions:

Design and display:

The Zopo Speed 7 features polycarbonate chassis with metallic RIM, narrow display-bezels, and a removable back panel design. It feels light and nice in hands, and looks good, but it is nothing that we have not seen before.

The front has a selfie camera, a 5-inch display and Zopo branding, while the rear features a slightly protruded camera followed by flash, Zopo logo, and speaker. On the right side of the phone, sit a volume rocker and a power key, the top accommodates a 3.5mm audio-jack and the bottom comes with a microUSB slot.

Speaking of display, the phone features a 5-inch Full HD (1080x1920 pixel) IPS display that is nice and bright, and offers good viewing angles. The three capacitive touch keys, including Back, Home and App switcher, are placed in the display itself.

Processor and memory:

The Zopo Speed 7 is powered by MediaTek MT6753 64-bit octa-core chipset clocked at 1.5GHz, with a Mali T720 GPU. It is equipped with 3GB of RAM paired with 16GB of inbuilt storage. The phone's hardware specifications seem promising and the phone should be able to perform smoothly, especially while running heavy games.

Camera:

The Zopo Speed 7 flaunts a 13-megapixel primary camera with Sony sensor, f/2.0 aperture and sapphire lens. During our brief hands on experience, we found that the camera worked nice for the price of the phone, though we will reserve our opinion on the camera performance for our review of the device.

For selfie enthusiasts, the phone has a 5-megapixel front-facing camera with 87.3 degree wide-angle lens.

Software:

The Speed 7 runs Android 5.1 Lollipop wrapped under Zopo's own Z-UI. The bloatware is light and we didn't see any major change being slapped on raw interface. The touch interface of the phone too worked well.

Conclusion:

The Zopo Speed 7 brings quite interesting features and specifications, but it does not push the envelope further to beat its competition. The dual SIM phone supports 4G LTE connectivity, but only supports FDD-LTE Band 3 (1800MHz), which is currently supported by Airtel's 4G services in Chennai and NCR as for now. The phone features a 2,500mAh battery.

It will be interesting to see how Zopo will perform in the market which already has many other Chinese entrants that offers phones with similar features and specs.