In such a situation, how Lava Mobiles remained behind. The company has submitted its claim in this segment through its premium brand Zolo. The Xolo Black handset is available for Rs 12,999. This handset comes with many useful features such as dual rear cameras and front flash and also makes full efforts to show itself ‘premium’. Will Xolo Black be able to leave its mark in the market? Let’s know.
Look and design
The Xolo Black appears due to curved ange and matte finish metal frames like Sony Xperia Z3 (Sony Xperia Z3). Glass has been used in the body of Xolo Black. There is also a protection of Corning Gorilla Glass on the front and rear panels, which will help keep the handset scratch free. The front camera and the flash used with it are placed on both the top corners of the top. The backpanel has a dual-camera setup in addition to the branding of Xolo and Hive. Charging ports and speakers are ranked in the top and 3.5mm headset socket of the phone.
SIM trays are on the left side of the phone and the power and volume button on the right side. The second SIM slot can also be used as a microSD card slot. The power button also works as a status light, which we found strange. By the way, at the price of Rs 12,999, the company has introduced an excellent build phone and it looks more premium than its rivals.
Specification and software
The Xolo Black uses Qualcomm Snapdragon 615 (2nd GEN) processor, ie it supports 4G. The good thing is that it also has support for the 4G bands used in India. The 5.5-inch display of the handset is with full-HD resolution, which has a pixel density of 401ppi. The device has 2GB of RAM (RAM), 16GB of internal storage (support for microSD cards up to 32GB) and 3,200mAh lithium-polymer batteries. The rear camera setup has two sensors, primary camera of 13 megapixels and secondary 2 megapixels. The front camera is 5 megapixels. In the Xolo Black, the company has used its Hive UI, based on Android Lollipop 5.0.2 (Android Lollipop 5.0.2). Hive is an interesting UI, which has many features which are not present on the rest of the device of this price range. The app drawer is slightly different. In this, the app can be customized on the basis of alphabet, time at installation and app category.
However, Hive performs slightly slightly slow. Sometimes the screen is slow to load and its animations also take more time to completely load. By the way, it mostly works, so we do not complain much. The default hive lock screen is very bad, it does not appeal at all. The good thing is that it can be disabled. You can customize quick launch keys and display notifications. Overall, its user interface is much better than other manifactors. The user gets a multiple option of customization and many changes are also possible through settings.
Camera
The funny thing is that the dual-camera setup has been used in the rear panel of Xolo Black. This setup increases the speed of the autofocus and gives the option to refocus on different parts of the photo. The same dual-camera feature was present in the HTC One M8 device. The device does rapid autofocus, but not much. The Refocus feature also works well, but it is not much use. Optizoom and chromaflash feature is necessary. Optizoom task is to improve the zoom quality of photographs, but it is not as effective. Chromaflash is needed in taking two consecutive pictures, one with a flash and the other without him. After this, the software creates a single image by combining these frames, on which the effect of flash is low and the result image is more real. Its performance made us happy.
Camera works fine in sharp, details and vibrant pictures, but white colors look more bright. A 5 -megapixel front camera works standard and has its own flash. Selfie lovers will like this feature, as this flash will help in taking better selfies in low light. It would not be wrong to say that Xolo will be happy with the camera of Xolo Black, who is fond of taking regular photos.
Camera software is easy to use and it has all the features and mode that you expect from a smartphone. Two apps have been given for the camera, one with a normal mode, which has several filters. Second, the dual camera app which also uses 2 megapixel secondary camera together. We became a little confused while using both these apps according to our needs. It is expected that this deficiency will be overcome in the next version.
Performance
The performance of Xolo Black is good. The device easily completes most of the tasks. Hive UI sometimes slows down, but it does not affect the performance of apps and games. Until we kept the phone with us, it never crashed. Voice quality was also good. The voice of the device’s headphones and speakers got good sound. It played mostly HD videos easily. However, with some file format problems with some. We also played the sonic runners game on the phone and found that there is no lag or performance problem anywhere. The phone has slowed down during multitasking, so we would suggest not to use more apps at one time. The display is full-HD, but it is a bit weak in terms of color and contrast.
Xolo Black scored 32,519 and 20,996 points in Antutu and Quadrant Tests respectively. We also ran the 3D Mark Ice Storm Extreme and GFXBench on the device, during which 5427 points and 14 FPS results were found respectively. The rest of the devices based on Snapdragon 615 have also given similar results. The battery lasted for 9 hours 41 minutes on our video loop test, which is slightly lower for a 3,200 mAh power device. The battery lasted easily for a day during normal use.
Our decision
Xolo Black is a smartphone with a better capacity than average, which does not cause any problem to use. It gives equal performance compared to the rest of its price range. It is also good to look at and there are some features that leave their different imprint.
Its dual rear camera setup, proper performance during front flash and photography gives a distinct identity to the device. We liked this phone and hope you will like it too. If you are looking for a phone that performs your work well and does not cost too much, then consider Xolo Black.