Smartron, the company which has Sachin Tendulkar as the investor, has launched SRT branded phone in India. Smartron SRT.phone is a new smartphone which will be competing the in sub 15k INR price segment in India with the likes of Xiaomi Redmi Note 4, Honor 6X and the Coolpad Cool 1.
Smartron’s entry into India was with the launch of t phone and t book (convertible laptop), but the company didn’t find much success partially because of the pricing. Now, the company is pushing for a more affordable segment with the srt.phone. The phone is also designed and engineered in India and packs good hardware for the pricing it is being offered. Here are our first impressions using the device.
In the design department, Smartron has kept it minimal with simple approach. While there isn’t anything ground breaking in terms of the design, it feels quite good. It isn’t a compact device with 5.5 inch screen size and also large bezels, but the weight of the device is 155g, so you won’t actually feel the size. It is made of polycarbonate material with a removable back panel. One of the biggest flaws in the design is the placement of power button on the top panel which is quite inconvenient. The volume key is placed on the right side. The bottom panel has USB C Type port and speaker unit. The top panel houses the power button and 3.5mm audio jack. The rear panel has the 13MP camera with LED flash, Smartron logo and the fingerprint scanner below it. There is an orange band running below the camera unit to add to the beauty of the device.
The front panel has 5.5 inch display, three capacitive buttons and front 5MP camera. Overall, the device definitely feels good even though it is made of a plastic panel. The build quality is good and it is also lightweight to use.
The phone packs a 5.5 inch Full HD display and the display quality is good. The brightness levels are good and so is the touch response and viewing angles. One of the areas where the company is promising a lot is the software. The srt.phone comes with near stock UI with Android 7.1.1 Nougat out of the box and one of the few phones to offer this version. The company is also promising 3 major Android upgrades and quarterly security updates. Software update is one of the main issues with most phones in this segment.
The phone is powered by Snapdragon 652 Octa core processor coupled with 4GB of RAM and Adreno 510 GPU. Snapdragon 652 is a powerful chipset with 4 cores Cortex A72. The phone is offered with 32GB and 64GB internal storage and with unlimited t cloud storage. There is no micro SD card expansion slot. The phone offers dual SIM cards with 4G LTE and VoLTE support. We tested the phone’s benchmark score and found it to be around 77287
The fingerprint scanner on the device is pretty quick and the company claims it to unlock the phone in 0.09 seconds making it one of the fastest in the segment. The phone has 13MP rear camera and 5MP front camera for selfies.
The device also comes with 3000mAh battery with Qualcomm’s Quick Charge 2.0 which is quite good for a phone in this segment. The company also claims that the phone will not heat up while charging. The phone is priced Rs 12,999 for the 32GB variant and 13,999 for the 64GB variant. It will be available exclusive on Flipkart with launch offers. The company is providing limited edition back case with Sachin’s signature and 2 year warranty as a part of launch offers.
Smartron’s srt.phone is a good device overall considering the package and pricing. We were quite impressed with the offering and we will be posting our detailed review soon. The phone will pit against the likes of Redmi Note 4 which is currently the best seller in the segment. With Sachin Tendulkar’s backing and brand value company aim’s to sell the phone in good numbers.
