The Lava Storm 5G is a good budget smartphone offering an elegant design, responsive display, decent performance, and a good enough battery. The camera on this smartphone might not be top-notch but it makes the Lava Storm 5G a decent option when you look at its price tag.
Lava’s latest budget smartphone, the Storm 5G launched in India on December 21. This smartphone comes with a pretty cool configuration for a sub-15K device. Lava has launched the Storm 5G in India for ₹13,499 for the sole 8GB RAM + 128GB storage variant. Along with that, the Storm 5G is equipped with a MediaTek Dimensity 6 series processor and packs a 5000mAh battery with fast charging support as well.
For a sub-Rs 15,000 smartphone, this sounds like a pretty good deal. But actually how good is the Lava Storm 5G? I have tested the device to its limits and in this review, I will tell you what’s good about this latest budget offering and what’s not. Let’s go!
The Lava Storm 5G comes with an elegant design. It features a glass back panel attached to a plastic mid-frame. On the back, there’s a dual camera setup integrated into two circular camera rings and an LED flash ring placed vertically. Next, in the bottom left corner, there’s a subtle Lava branding.
On the front, you get a punch-hole display. Furthermore, it has volume rockers and a capacitive power button placed on the right side of the panel and a SIM tray on the left. Next, it also has a 3.5mm headphone jack and a USB-C port.
Speaking of its colour options, Lava offers the Storm 5G in two colours; Gale Green (the variant I am using) and Thunder Black.
The design of this smartphone looks so good. It’s very neat, clean, and looks luxurious. There are no patterns or textures on the smartphone, just solid colours, which makes it look exquisite. Although, because of the curved edges and glass design, the grip feels a little slippery. But if you talk about looks, this is a looker!
The Lava Storm 5G comes with a 6.78-inch IPS LCD display that supports a 120Hz refresh rate and an FHD+ resolution. In my opinion, the display is quite responsive and bright for the price we pay.
For a budget smartphone, around 400 nits of brightness is considered to be a good number, and guess what? I ran the flux metre test on the Lava Storm 5G and it resulted in 478 nits of peak brightness. Furthermore, as I mentioned above, it has a 120Hz panel that provides very smooth and responsive feedback.
The Lava Storm 5G also supports FHD+ resolution, so it won’t disappoint you while streaming high-quality videos and so on. However, you won’t be able to watch 4K content on this smartphone but that didn’t really bother me. After all, what else do you want from a smartphone worth 13k?
The MediaTek Dimensity 6080 processor powers the Lava Storm 5G. This processor is paired with 8GB RAM and 128GB storage. Unfortunately, you don’t get more storage variants of the Storm 5G as Lava sells only one variant. Even though, the Lava Storm 5G does offer the expandable storage of up to 1TB.
However, the performance is quite impressive. The MediaTek Dimensity 6080 works so well with the Lava Storm 5G that I didn’t face any heating issues or lags during performance-centric operations. For example, I played Call of Duty: Mobile and it was running smoothly and didn’t even lag once.
I also ran some benchmark tests on the Lava Storm 5G and most of them outrun the Poco M6 Pro 5G from our testing database. For your context, the Poco M6 Pro 5G is backed by the Snapdragon 4 Gen 2, which is a competitor of the MediaTek Dimensity 6080. Here’s the comparison:
Coming to its operating system now, I have one good information for you and one not so good one too. Let’s talk about the former one first, the Lava Storm 5G runs on Android 13. Now what’s good here is that you don’t get bloatware in this smartphone, unlike other budget smartphones. The “not-so-good” information now is that Lava only offers one year of software updates and two years of security updates with the Lava Storm 5G.
The Lava Storm 5G is equipped with a dual-camera setup, holding a 50-megapixel main camera and an 8-megapixel ultrawide lens. On the front, there is a 16-megapixel selfie shooter. Now, how good is the Lava Storm 5G’s camera? Well, I must say it’s nice but not good enough.
Talking about its primary camera, this 50-megapixel sensor captures overexposed pictures. The saturation is too high in the pictures and they look vibrant. Although, not everyone minds vibrancy as some users opt for warm and colourful pictures, especially on budget smartphones. Along with that, the details it captures are not very satisfying. However, it was fine for me. Speaking of colours, its pictures look quite colourful but again, too bright and saturated.
Coming to its portrait mode, if you look closely, the edge detection is not impressive in the Lava Storm 5G. Although, the portrait shots look good if you don’t zoom in.
Moreover, the Lava Storm 5G can’t be your go-to smartphone for night photography. Usually, you don’t get a good low-light camera in budget smartphones and with this smartphone, it’s the same. Furthermore, it also blurs the distant objects in Night Mode.
The 16-megapixel selfie shooter clicks colourful pictures, so colourful that I felt it has been overdone. However, I don’t mind that and I feel that most of the budget smartphone users want their pictures to be bright and colourful.
The Lava Storm 5G is backed by a 5000mAh battery that supports 33-watt fast charging. The battery of this smartphone is also doable as I believe it can run for up to 48 hours on a single charge when performing basic operations.
If we do gaming or use Maps, here’s the result:
I played Call of Duty: Mobile for 15 minutes on the Storm 5G. In 15 minutes of gaming, the battery dropped by 6 percent. Furthermore, I watched an FHD+ video for 30 minutes and the drop was the same, 6 percent. However, one hour of Google Maps consumed 8 percent of the battery. In my opinion, the battery optimisation in the Lava Storm 5G was quite impressive, and what’s more impressive is that it didn’t heat up much while running any of the battery tests.
To conclude, I feel that the Lava Storm 5G is a good budget smartphone offering an elegant design, responsive display, decent performance, and a good enough battery. The camera on this smartphone might not be top-notch but it makes the Lava Storm 5G a decent option when you look at its price point of ₹13,499. So if you are looking for a smartphone in the sub-15k category, the Lava Storm 5G is easy to recommend.
