Lava plans to introduce better photography into the budget smartphone category with the launch of the new Pixel V2.
While buying a smartphone, you will come across a plethora of devices in the budget category, costing around Rs. 10,000. Although theses budget phones offer minimal but sufficient specs considering the price, the camera sensors aren’t really satisfying. Lava has released the Pixel V2, which is an addition to its Pixel lineup of smartphones, directed towards users who want a good-quality camera under a tight budget.
The 5-inch screen on the device is made of Asahi Dragontrail glass and has a resolution of 1280×720. The brightness of the display wasn’t favourable outdoors and you have to cover the screen when there’s sunlight directly incident on the display. The design of the phone is more of a generic one but does feature the metal rim design, which is catching up on almost all devices nowadays. The rim isn’t metal, it’s made out of plastic reinforced with a metallic texture finish. The plastic body does manage to offer a good feel while holding the device and doesn’t feel like a cheap one.
The Pixel V2 is powered by a quad-core 64-bit MediaTek MT6735 processor, clocked at 1GHz. The device isn’t loaded up with too much bloatware, a practice often followed by manufacturers. There wasn’t any lag visible on the device, which will obviously be evident only after installing more applications running in the background. We’ll get a broader view of the performance after the smartphone goes through our rigorous testing process.
Lava decided not to add any buttons or slot on the left side of the device, bringing both the power buttons and volume rockers to the right side of the device. The power button and volume rockers don’t have much of a tactile feedback. You will have to enforce a harder pressure on them to use those buttons.
The device is a dual-SIM phone, both the SIMs supporting 4G, and also has an expandable memory slot capable of supporting up to 32GB using a micro-SD card. You can insert the SIM cards and micro-SD card by removing the back panel. The back panel has a unique texture on each variant. The battery on the device is non-removable and has a capacity of 2500mAh.
Talking about the camera on this device, of which Lava is highly ambitious about, it does seem to be of a better quality compared to the other options in the category. The 13MP camera on the back comes with an aperture size of f/2.0 and seems to manage really clear photos in natural light and wasn’t bad at all indoors. The front camera with an 8MP sensor was able to click good quality pictures or selfies you might say and also features an LED flash.
Low-light pictures weren’t really satisfying, but the quality of the pictures in natural light looked really good. The performance and quality of the camera can only be established after we compare the shots with other devices, and we’ll probably throw the Pixel V2 against smartphones with higher specifications as well.
The Lava Pixel V2 comes with its own custom UI called Star OS 2.0, built over Android 5.1 Lollipop. Star OS is directed more towards the performance and resource utilisation of the device and less towards its beautification. Lava has ensured regular updates on Star OS, as they improve the device’s performance. The device will be available online from September 15 in the Royal Sparkle Black and Icy White variant. The Prism Blue variant, said to give a more premium look and feel, will be coming in at around October.
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Abhijit Dey
A Star Wars fan and sci-fi enthusiast. When I'm not playing games on my PC, I usually lurk around the Internet, mostly on Reddit. View Full Profile
