Reach Allure Review

Selling smartphones has never been easier, and these days anyone can enter the smartphone business with just a little money. There are a lot of brands in the smartphone market (both online and offline) these days and you might not have even heard of many of them. And these companies are selling low cost smartphones in the budget. Such new companies are growing these days also because there is a market for such phones which mostly remain without much discussion.

For Gadgets 360, we constantly get requests to review new budget-priced smartphones, but it is not possible for us to review every phone. Today we have the Reach Allure smartphone from Reach Mobiles, a subsidiary of Rashmi Group. This budget smartphone, priced around Rs 5,000, has been introduced as an iconic smartphone.

Look and Design
True to its price, the Allure uses a plastic body instead of a metal body. At first glance it looks like an iPhone and we think it has been deliberately designed like an iPhone. This phone is available in four color variants of iPhone (including Rose Gold). However, the quality of the plastic as well as the fit and finish are also not great. There is also a slight gap in the plastic around the curved edge of the display. There is a physical home button at the bottom for navigation and a 5-megapixel camera at the top. The ring around the home button is intended to look like Apple’s TouchID fingerprint sensor. But it is not a sensor. There is no notification LED in the phone.

The 5.5 inch QHD (540×960 pixels) resolution IPS display of this phone is not too bad except for its low resolution. The brightness level is also decent but the screen gets washed out in sunlight. There is also a slight gap between the outer glass and the actual display which can be seen when you press on the screen. For this reason, the touch response on the phone is quite poor and sometimes the phone recognizes a tap gesture as a swipe. To compensate for the lack of protective glass, the Allure’s display already comes with a screen guard.

The Reach Allure smartphone has a micro-USB and headphone socket at the top while there is a single speaker at the bottom. The volume and power buttons are not very well placed and do not move easily. The rear cover is not easy to remove but once you remove it you can see two SIM card slots and a microSD card slot along with the removable battery. The Allure smartphone has a 10-megapixel rear camera with single LED flash.

When you purchase the Reach Allure, you will get a power adapter, data cable, and a flip cover in the box. The quality of the cable is decent but the flip case is of very poor quality. If the case continues even for a month then consider yourself lucky. Overall, the Allure is made from very poor quality materials. The fit and finish of the plastics could have been better. In our view, any user would probably buy this smartphone online just because it looks like an iPhone.

Specifications and Software
The Reach Allure phone has a 1.3 GHz quad-core MediaTek MT6580 processor. This phone has 1 GB RAM and 8 GB storage, the storage can be expanded via microSD card (up to 32 GB). This phone of Reach has features like Wi-Fi B/G/N, Bluetooth 4.0, FM radio and GPS. The phone does not support 4G and only 3G will work on both SIMs.

Talking about software, this phone runs on Android 5.1 Lollipop with custom launcher. You get an app drawer in the phone and the option to choose transition effects. The multi-purpose home button serves different functions depending on how you press it. While a single press takes you back one step in an app, a long press opens an additional setting and a double press takes you to the home screen. However, if you’re on the home screen, a double press will take you to recent apps while a long press will open a menu where you can customize the wallpaper, theme, and other settings. The home button performs very poorly and requires a lot of effort to use.

Along with this, Reach has also included some gesture-based shortcuts that let you run apps when the screen is off. WeChat, WhatsApp and some other Google apps come pre-installed in the phone.

performance
Reach Allure is not very convenient to use due to its size but the good thing is that it is quite light. Despite having 1 GB RAM, the interface does not cause much problem. Sometimes the smartphone stops suddenly and you may have to wait for a while to use it again. We got good figures from the phone in benchmark testing. We did not face any problem in playing 3D games in this phone of Reach nor did we face any kind of heating problem.

Stock video player is provided to play videos in this smartphone. Full-HD videos can be played on the phone but we faced problem in playing some high-bitrate files. The music player is an older version of Android so it’s not very appealing but it can get the job done. Out of 8 GB inbuilt storage, only 4.7 GB is of use to the user.

The phone is said to have a 10-megapixel autofocus rear camera and the same specifications are mentioned everywhere and in the listing. But in the footnote written on the back side of its box, it is written that ‘the camera can be enhanced through software’. In our benchmarking test, we found the phone to have an 8-megapixel rear and 5-megapixel front camera. Apart from this, we captured some RAW files from the phone’s camera using EngineeringMode app from Play Store and we found out that it has an 8 megapixel camera. An 8-megapixel camera isn’t bad for an entry-level smartphone, and in our opinion, this was done to make the phone look better on the online retailer’s page.

Photos taken with the phone’s camera at both resolutions are of below average quality. The biggest problem is the slow focus of the phone, which makes it difficult to take sharp pictures. The picture is blurry even in light motion. The camera does not produce correct colors and the pictures appear very dull. The phone has a burst shooting (up to 10 shots) feature but the capture speed is quite slow.

Maximum video recording of 1080 pixels can be done from both the cameras of the phone. Here also the quality is below average. Selfies taken from the front camera also disappoint.

battery life
Reach Allure has a 2600 mAh battery which lasted for 5 hours and 27 minutes in our video loop test. This is very low compared to other smartphones. During normal use, we were able to use this phone in less than a day.

our decision
Reach Allure is priced at Rs 5,444 and is currently available exclusively on online retailer ShopClues. It is very difficult to tell any special feature in this phone and this phone performs below average in every respect. Compared to the InFocus Bingo 10 (Review), the Allure has a larger and brighter display which may turn off some customers.

We can see that this phone might appeal to people who want a cheap iPhone clone but other than that there’s no other reason to buy it. The build quality of the phone is very poor. Battery life and camera are decent and performance is not bad. The lack of 4G is also painful.