Akai F1 – The budget racer Review

A feature packed phone with loads of goodies like a preloaded NES emulator, apart from a decent camera, the Akai F1 is good enough to keep any budget phone user happy and satisfied.

The build quality of the phone at first feels very plasticky but as we went on to use it more and more it feels quiet sturdy and didn’t feel cheap at all. It has a very Vertu/Blackberry Pearl-ish look to it which Akai claims is Italian design. The keypad is a bit weird – it has horizontally long keys which work only if they are pressed in the center, so if you think the extra length on the sides is going to help, it’s not. It’s more for show, and ends up making typing a bit strenuous and could be a big negative for this phone’s Italian design. It comes with no dedicated keys for volume or camera, and has a very powerful loudspeaker placed right next to the camera on the back with a slight slit on the back panel to let the sound out.

[RELATED_ARTICLE]The phone has a very plain interface with not much graphics added to it but it does have a very interesting way of switching screens which scrolls up or down to reveal the next or the previous menu. It’s pretty easy to understand and get though, and also has a number assigned to each of the options in a menu to increase accessibility. It is a rather feature rich phone with a lot of memory to store songs and even NES games (yes, this phone comes with a built in emulator for your favoring classic Nintendo games like Mario and Contra) – all you need to do is find a ROM for these games, and transfer them to the phone. It also comes preloaded with the Mario theme as one of its ringtones. The data transfer speeds via USB were around 3.325 mb/s which is not lightning fast but it does the job without making you wait till your hair grows white. On the other hand Bluetooth was a little bit disappointing with a speed of just 78 kb/s.

The F1 comes with a 3 megapixel camera which in spite of its high resolution lacks the quality you would want. As its always been the case, megapixels don’t matter unless you have the quality to back it up, so they might as well would have put a VGA camera – even the controls aren’t all that comfortable, we actually had to take a look at the manual to figure out how the digital zoom works. The media player surprisingly only supports MP3 files for audio and MP4 files for video. The sound quality over the head phones was pretty decent, it comes with a pair or noise isolating earphones which was a surprise and they perform well, not great, but they do a good job in isolating the outside sounds by quite a bit – so you won’t have to bombard your ear with loud volumes just to drown out the outside sounds.

Overall, it’s a pretty good phone and we would say it performs better than many of its budget competitors, what Akai could have however done is added a dedicated volume button which could have doubled up as the zoom button for the camera, apart from improving upon the keypad quality and the loudspeaker quality. 

Verdict:

A feature packed phone with loads of goodies like a preloaded NES emulator, apart from a decent camera, the Akai F1 is good enough to keep any budget phone user happy and satisfied.

Specifications: Dual SIM (GSM-GSM); Display: 2.4 inch, 320 x 240 pixels, 65K colours; Memory: 4GB bundled microSD ; 3MP camera

Rating:
Features: 6
Performance: 5.5
Build: 6
Value: 5.5
Overall: 6

Website: www.gbes.asia
Customer care: 18601802524
E-mail address: wecare@gbes.asia, info@gbes.asia
Price: Rs. 4,995 (MRP)
Warranty: 6 months for accessories, 1 year for phone including battery