Expert Adviser- Akash Ghosh
In the previous years a huge number of Smartphone companies emerged from “ nowhere “, companies like Karbon, Micromax, Xolo and some more have entered the huge world of the Smartphone industries and have made a huge name for themselves and they now rank by the top Smartphone companies like Apple, Samsung and Nokia. But Spice is not at all far from these Smartphone giants and there new release “ Spice Smart Flo Mettle 5X ” can also make them reach at the same level like the other leading companies so let’s see what they have this time.
Spice Smart Flo Mettle 5X Review
Design-
The Spice Smart Flo Mettle 5X looks almost similar to all the other Smartphones which we already have around us. Its cover is made of plastic though its weight is much more than normal smartphones with plastic covers and can sometimes make one feel uneasy if he/she holds it for a long time.
Spice Smart Flo Mettle 5X has a removable rear panel actually made of metal with a plastic cover. The front panel looks similar to the other smatphones, the edges are rounded so it makes it easy to hold the phone. The Spice Smart Flo Mettle 5X features a 5 inch display screen at the front and a 1.3 megapixels front facing camera with three captive buttons namely Settings, Home and Back in the front, though the buttons are not always backlit and can cause problem in locating the buttons in dark. It also features an 8 megapixels camera with a flash light at the back. The Spice Smart Flo Mettle 5X also has a notification red light which glows when there is a miss call or a message.
The Spice Smart Flo Mettle 5X come with 148.5×78.9×10.4mm dimensions, it has a micro-USB port and a 3.5mm audio port, the power key is located at the right side whereas the volume rocker is located on the left side of the phone.
The back cover covers the battery chamber, the dual SIM card slots and the Micro-SD card slot, one cannot remove the SIMs without switching off the device because the card slot is located just adjacent to the Spice Smart Flo Mettle 5X’s battery.
On an overall basis the Spice Smart Flo Mettle 5X looks nice and stylish.
Display –
The Spice Smart Flo Mettle 5X features a 5-inch display that has a resolution of 480×854 pixels (FWVGA) with a pixel density of 233ppi. The display is affordable as compared to the price, the display is not very sharp like other high class Smartphones. The display is also a bit dull and the display screen of Spice Smart Flo Mettle 5X is very reflective and is also prone to finger prints.
The viewing angles of Spice Smart Flo Mettle 5X were also not good and there were slight distortions while viewing videos and images though the touch response is really good compared to the other features.
Camera-
The Spice Smart Flo Mettle 5X features an 8-megapixel rear autofocus camera with a 1.3-megapixel front-facing camera. The rear 8 megapixels camera took decent photos though there was a little bit loss of details. The photos clicked with the Spice Smart Flo Mettle 5X were good enough to upload on social networking sites but were not up to the mark so that it can be used for professional purpose.
The pictures taken in dark were very dull and were not at all sharp though the flash light could make up the lows and click more or less decent pictures.
The Spice Smart Flo Mettle 5X’s camera can also record VGA videos of 640×480 pixels though the video quality is not good and the sound recorded also gets distorted.
The 1.3 megapixel front facing camera of Spice Smart Flo Mettle 5X can be used to click self pictures and can become useful sometimes.
The Spice Smart Flo Mettle 5X Camera App provides a lot of shooting options like HDR, Panorama, smile shot, landscape and face-detection. The app also allows us to adjust sharpness, saturation, hue, brightness etc.
Software-
The Spice Smart Flo Mettle 5X runs on Android Jelly Bean 4.2.2 out-of-the-box. The interface of Spice Smart Flo Mettle 5X is highly modified and one couldn’t believe at the beginning that it was running on Android.
The Spice Smart Flo Mettle 5X’s lock-screen features 4 different panes which can be easily changed later on. It does not provide the normal Android home screen but instead provides a custom home screen with custom layout similar to the one of the iPhone. The Spice Smart Flo Mettle 5X provides nine home screen panels in which you can add apps though Spice Smart Flo Mettle 5X does not support widgets in the home screens.
The Spice Smart Flo Mettle 5X’s notification tray features a settings option, a clear all notifications button, with an expandable notifications option. The Spice Smart Flo Mettle 5X features the similar setting toggle options that are found in other Android phones, for quick access to airplane mode, battery status, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPS, data connection, data usage, audio profiles, brightness etc.
The Spice Smart Flo Mettle 5X also offers a lot of different pre-installed apps like Facebook, Numbuzz, Twitter, WhatsApp and Black Berry Messenger (BBM). The Spice Smart Flo Mettle 5X also features Gesture controls for ease to use.
The Spice Smart Flo Mettle 5X provides free 2GB of cloud storage accompanied by the protection from Netqin Antivirus for the first few months. It also has QuickOffice pre-installed to quickly edit Microsoft document files on the go.
The Spice Smart Flo Mettle 5X comes with the “ Power Saver “ facility which helps to minimize the Battery and Processor consumption while it’s screen is locked for five minutes.
According to me the Spice Smart Flo Mettle 5X features a lot of things that are very useful and in modern days like this, it becomes very important for us to have these apps around us.
Hardware –
The Spice Smart Flo Mettle runs on a dual-core 1.3GHz processor with 512MB of RAM. Despite of the processor speed and low RAM on the Spice Smart Flo Mettle 5X, it feels very responsive in using.
However, the Spice Smart Flo Mettle 5X’s browser sometimes becomes slow in rendering pages, and it can be often found that the heavy graphic games like Temple Run 2, Nun Attack and Plants Vs Zombies 2 also lag the device sometimes.
The experience of playing some popular but not so heavy graphics games like Fruit Ninja, Subway Surfers and Angry Birds on the Spice Smart Flo Mettle 5X was quite good.
Considering the fact that the Spice Smart Flo Mettle 5X comes with a 512MB of RAM it is not surprising that the multi-tasking experience will be disturbing. It includes a 4GB inbuilt storage out of which roughly 2GB is user-available though it supports expandable storage up to 32GB via microSD card.
The call and sound quality of the Spice Smart Flo Mettle 5X was really nice. The phone features a dual GSM+GSM SIM functionality though it only supports 2G Networking and not 3G.
Full HD videos cannot be played on it and the Video player supports only .AVI and .MP4 formats only.
The Hardware facilities were not bad but could have been better as compared to its price, though one can easily have fun with what it already has.
Battery-
The Spice Smart Flo Mettle 5X packs an 1800mAh battery which can support the device for about one and a half days (or a little bit more) with 1 to 1.5 hours of talktime with push mail being activated, Music plying, playing some games, Facebook and messaging on and not to forget the Youtube video streaming. The phone was usually hooked to Wi-Fi with GPRS on.
On an average the Battery life was excellent !
Price-
Now the main part comes here “The Price” OK, the Spice Smart Flo Mettle 5X has been tagged with a price tag of Rs. 6,499 which is really considerable for such a Smartphone with fully loaded apps and hardware facilities.
Though I believe that the price is perfect but I also think that it might also be reduced a bit so that it can be fair for both the seller and the consumer.
Advice-
The Spice Smart Flo Mettle 5X is really a good Smartphone which also fits in the budget of one easily. The phone also has a lot of features and I think it could be a good phone for one who doesn’t want to spend much but still wants to have a Smartphone.
Thank you for reading :).
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Posted at 00:45 | by
Akash Ghosh
