The Xolo Black from Lava is indeed a well rounded mobile phone. However, the recent price cuts offered by Lenovo for Moto E and Moto G (second generation), Xolo Black can only find a firm footing if it came with some swift price cuts.
Lava, the manufacturer of Xolo brand, has seen the hot trend of online exclusive sales picking up, and has decided to become a part of it. The start to this campaign would have been important and Xolo Black seems to be a good attempt first up.
From being a premium looking phone to packing in all the in-vogue features, Xolo Black has the ingredients. But can the ever increasing competition allow it a slice of the pie? Let's take a look at the chances of this new device.
Built
With glass back, rounded corners, and matte metal frame, one can easily mistake it for a Sony Xperia Z3. Unfortunately, the glass back is prone to scratches, and attracts fingerprints and smudges as well. Lava has used Gorilla Glass 3 for both the fronts to enhance sturdiness.
Thankfully, the grip is assisted with the side anodised plastic material. Overall the unibody built gave good impressions when the device was held in hands.
Design
Available in only one colour, the Xolo Black seems to be well designed with unibody construction. The bezels have been kept narrow on the sides, and these get broader at the top and the bottom. The top edge houses the 3.5 mm headphone jack, the power and volume buttons are on the right side. The bottom edge sports the speaker and the charging port.
The left side carries the dual SIM tray. Disappointingly, Lava went with the curious trend of making the user choose between using a second SIM or a microSD card. This is pretty unnerving for many.
The power button doubles up as a notification light. This is an ill conceived concept, as the button should always be in the line of sight, beating the idea of a notification alert from any distance or angle of view.
The rear side will draw attention as Xolo Black carryies a dual camera set up with a flash. The front camera, surprisingly, has its own flash as well.
Display
Xolo Black comes with a 5.5-inch full HD display. A resolution of 1080 x 1920p is good to have, and pixel density comes out to be an impressive 401 ppi. The display has good colours as well as viewing angles.
Details on the display are good, but the screen isn't exactly the best or near best in its class. The contrast definitely could have been better along with the colour palette.
Thankfully, the colours are natural and the display overall offers good experience.
Hardware
Powered by Qualcomm's Snapdragon 615 SoC, Lava has done well to bring in the second gen set up here. The quadcore processors comprises of Cortex-A53 processor clocked at 1.5 GHz, and another Cortex-A53 clocked at 1.0 Ghz. Adreno 205 for GPU and 2GB of RAM completes the configuration.
The phone allows users to extend storage memory up to 32GB via microSD card, in addition to the 16GB of onboard storage memory.
Connectivity
The phone has been provided with some impressive connectivity features to keep it in contention with its contemporaries.
The Xolo Black has 4G as its biggest plus point. Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.0 connectivity find their place as well. AGPS and Glonass boost the credentials and FM radio option provides it with old school robustness among Indian masses. Overall, a rich haul here.
Other notable features
The phone boasts of features like a document viewer, photo and video editor, apart from a dedicated reader mode for the ebooks. The latter transforms the screen to monochrome viewer only, thus enhancing the experience.
The notification light can be programmed to be lit up with different colours for different notifications. Lava also crammed in sensors like proximity sensor, gyro, accelerometer and a compass.
Software
The phone comes with Android Lollipop 5.0.2 as the base OS, and with Hive user interface slapped on it. The interface is pretty looking and allows the users to customise it to a good degree. For instance, the apps can be arranged either by alphabet, or installation time, or even the category the app belongs to.
The presence of not too heavy pre installed apps is a delight, besides, some apps like McAffee being useful to begin with. The pre installed browser Comet has Opera feature of data compression to aid in limiting data consumption.
Apps like anti-theft, app lock, device tracking, as well as SIM change alert functions makes the OS feel rich.
Overall, Hive looks something which can be managed with, and has potential to become more polished with future upgrades and iterations.
Performance
In day to day tasks, the OS did not break too much of a sweat. As mentioned, it may throw up few instances where it is not smooth. These were more like executions of eye candy transition effects and animations.
Apps themselves run nicely, and the Hive OS does pretty good with daily tasks.
While handling app switching, or more intensive tasks like HD gaming and videos, there weren't any hiccups. The speaker could have been loud though.
Camera
The rear camera on the Xolo Black comes with a 13MP unit and has another 2MP camera for company with the LED flash. The front camera is a 5MP affair with its own LED flash as well.
It is interesting to see Lava going ahead with a two camera set up for the rear camera. This allows the user the ability to refocus a picture after it has been taken. HTC One series has few camera set ups similar to this, and Lava has tried to emulate the same. Another advantage is the quicker autofocus lock, Chromaflash and Optizoom.
Chromaflash captures two images in quick succession: One with flash, and other without. These two results then are combined to come up with a more balanced image. Optizoom's job is to provide enhanced zoom.
While the Chromaflash impresses, the Optizoom is reduced to a gimmick, with very few instances of enhanced results. The rear camera performs about decently overall, capturing about good details and colour reproduction. Nothing fancy here really.
The video results were easily acceptable, but not too many expectations are to be associated with the videography department.
The front camera, bolstered with its own flash, captures good images for them to be shared around, and this should catch the fancy of the selfie enthusiasts instantly.
Battery
The battery capacity with Xolo Black is 3200 mAh. On a normal usage pattern, the back up will easily survive for a day. The battery can provide about 700 hrs worth of stand by time on a 3G network.
With the ability to churn 24hrs worth of talktime on 3G network, the battery performance has been impressive.
Verdict
The Xolo Black from Lava is indeed a well rounded mobile phone. With good features overall, this is worth considering. However, the recent price cuts offered by Lenovo for Moto E and Moto G (second generation), Xolo Black can only find a firm footing if it came with some swift price cuts.
At Rs 12999, it will be a tall order to even sway prospective buyers who have an eye on Motorola products, especially the Moto G (3rd generation).
