Review: iBall mSLR Cobalt 4

Cobalt 4 comes with four compact lenses.

Smartphone cameras are becoming more important than ever before. They are easily accessible when it comes to capturing a moment. iBall, the Indian smartphone manufacturer, has introduced a new phone, Cobalt 4, which comes with four compact lenses. While these do add a rather generous dose of flexibility to the photography experience, we are not sure if this unique feature can make up for the disappointments elsewhere. The Cobalt 4 is priced at Rs.8,899.

Design: hefty but well-built and good-looking

The phone has a neat design and the curves hide its thickness. The golden strips on the sides and the copper home button with extended design lines on each side give the phone a unique look. While the phone weighs 160g, a bit more than the average weight of a 5-inch screen phone, it doesn’t feel heavy.

Display: far from the perfect canvas

The 5-inch LCD screen (960x540 resolution) doesn’t really have a sweet spot in terms of brightness and colour reproduction. Brightness, when set above 50%, hurts the eyes. The colours are too rich; clearly, there is some algorithm that is working in the background to make this LCD look like an AMOLED screen, and that doesn’t work. We noticed a bug in the auto-brightness mode—the moment you switch it on, the display turns itself off; you have switch it on manually. The low resolution is obvious when you are watching a movie or playing a game. The text looks fine as long as you don’t zoom in too much. iBall should have taken a cue from Lenovo and Xiaomi and worked on making the display better.

Performance: good with basic tasks

With the MediaTek 6572 octa-core processor paired with 1 GB RAM, the phone is smooth enough when you are using up to five apps at the same time—beyond that, lags start to show. Surprisingly, even the graphic-intensive Fifa 15 gameplay was smooth. This just points to the powerful graphics capabilities of the processor.

There is 8 GB internal storage—3.5 GB is labelled as internal storage and another 1.8 GB as phone storage; the rest is occupied by system apps. This kind of storage classification is new to Android smartphones, and it just doesn’t work. Anything you copy to the phone, such as movies or music, goes to the phone storage, while apps downloaded from the Play Store go to the internal storage space. We could not find any way of changing these settings. There isn’t enough space for apps or music in either of the two partitions, unless you slot in a microSD card for extra space.

We also noticed a slight issue with the Wi-Fi signal—it would disconnect frequently and one had to turn off the Wi-Fi and switch it on again to reconnect. The Cobalt 4 lacks 4G support, which is available in a number of similarly priced rivals.

Camera: a lot of lens attachments

The 8-megapixel (MP) camera is the main highlight, and there are four compact lenses that can be bolted on. The zoom lens comes in handy for long-distance shots, but if you do not have steady hands, the photographs will look blurred. The fish-eye lens introduces an element of fun if you want circular wide-angle images. The lens is smaller in size and works well in almost all lighting conditions.

The most impressive of the three is the macro lens, which captures an amazing amount of detail, hard to get even in high-end phone cameras. There is also a wide-angle lens which works only with the macro lens. One has to attach it over the macro lens to use it.

These lenses cannot be attached directly to the phone, but are screwed on to the special phone case that is shipped with the Cobalt 4. You have to put the phone in the case if you want to use the lens.

Minus the lenses, the camera itself is pretty average. The slow processor means that image processing takes time. Outdoor shots are quite detailed, but disturbance shows up the moment you zoom in. The 3-MP front camera is good for selfies, but works well only when used in bright light.

Software: loaded with too many apps

The phone runs on Android 4.4, which is extremely old. While the customizations to the interface have been kept to a minimum, the icons don’t always look good. Instead of the usual app drawer icon, iBall has packed in its own logo, which you have to tap to go to the app listing. The phone comes with around 50 pre-loaded apps, including Chaatz, Dr Safety, BlackBox, Kamaal Dhamaal and WeChat—they eat up a lot of space, and many are not worth using.

Battery: keep a charger close

The device packs in a 2,000 mAh battery but didn’t even last a full day with everyday usage, which included Web browsing, reading, gaming for 30 minutes, and watching videos for an hour.

Verdict

The separate attachment lenses are the highlight of the Cobalt 4. Other than that, however, the phone disappoints. The YU Yuphoria (Rs.6,999) and Lenovo K3 Note (Rs.9,999) offer much better specifications and performance.