ZTE today made a grand entry into the Indian mobile market by launching six new Android smartphones, chief among which is the Grand X Quad Lite. The quad-core flagship device priced at Rs 14,999 enters a highly competitive market dominated by the likes of Micromax and Karbonn among others. So will it succeed to carve out a niche for itself? We got to spend some time with the device during the launch event, and here are our first impressions.
The phone doesn’t have the kind of looks that will make it stand out in the crowd, sporting a plastic back panel and a metal frame around the body. The quality of the back panel though is not up to the mark and feels a bit flimsy. On the top you will find a 3.5mm audio jack, volume rocker and a micro-USB port on the sides and a speaker grille at the rear.
The front of the device flaunts a 5-inch display with capacitive buttons, but one glaring omission is an HD display. Unlike other phones in its segment that offer 720p displays, the Grand X Quad Lite has to make do with a qHD display supporting a resolution of 540×960 pixels. The display though manages to do a decent job in reproducing colors and pictures looks just about okay. Another grouse we have with the display is that it is a fingerprint magnet, and we had to keep wiping the display even after minimal use.The phone doesn’t have the kind of looks that will make it stand out in the crowd, sporting a plastic back panel and a metal frame around the body. The quality of the back panel though is not up to the mark and feels a bit flimsy. On the top you will find a 3.5mm audio jack, volume rocker and a micro-USB port on the sides and a speaker grille at the rear.
Talking of performance, the phone is powered by a quad-core processor clocked at 1.2GHz and paired with 1GB of RAM. ZTE did not reveal the manufacturer of the processor, only calling it ‘Zabardast’ and comparing its performance to that of a fighter jet. Though it may not come close to the blazing speeds of a jet engine, overall performance is quite smooth and apps open and close without hesitation. ZTE has also decided to leave the Android 4.2.1 Jelly Bean largely undisturbed, which is another reason for the smoothness. There is 4GB of internal storage, which is expandable to up to 32GB using a microSD card and also a 2,500mAh battery powering the device.
On the photography front, the device boasts a 5-megapixel rear camera and a 0.3-megapixel camera at the front. We didn’t get much time to use the camera and the lighting conditions weren’t the best either. We will reserve our judgment until we have put the camera through a series of tests in a review.
