Intex has launched its second 4G-enabled smartphone, the Intex Aqua Trend in India. The device is priced around Rs. 9,400.
Box Content
Apart from the smartphone and its battery, Intex has also provided a screen guard, a smartphone case, a microUSB cable for charging and file transfers, and earphones. This is a pretty decent packaging for a device in this price range, but the quality of the accessories in nothing great.
Design and Build Quality
The Intex Aqua Trend has some solid looks when you check out the device from the front. However, the device feels quite plasticky when you hold it in your hands, thanks to its removable back cover. While you do get used to it in couple of hours, the patterned plastic back cover does not really feel rich.
Screen Quality
The smartphone is equipped with a 5-inch IPS LCD display that has a resolution of 720 x 1,280 pixels. Even though the device display lacks in terms of contrast and colours, it makes up for it in the brightness department. The screen, honestly, is just average. I have been using the Huawei Honor 4X as my secondary device since the past couple of days, and the Aqua Trend offers much brighter display, which helps a lot in terms of sunlight legibility.
Camera
Aqua Trend sports a 13 Megapixel rear end camera with LED flash and a 5 Megapixel front-facing camera. The device manages to take decent pictures from its camera on the rear end. However, do not bother zooming in the picture, the camera lacks clarity. The 5 Megapixel front facing camera is definitely a surprise when you compare it with what other handsets in the similar range have to offer. If you’re a selfie person and want to go a device in this go for Intex Aqua Trend.
Battery:
While it is equipped with 3000mAh battery, the battery life is not that good. With exhaustive usage on (3G connection) of apps like Twitter, Facebook (which is battery hogger) the battery lasted for 10-10:30 hours and with media usage even less. For a device with 3000mAh battery, you expect the device to last at least for 12 hours with decent apps & calls usage. Aqua Trent was a downer in this respect.
That said, the device also takes a lot longer to charge.
Call quality:
Call quality is just average. However I faced issues whenever I had to make VOIP calls. The volume on VOIP calls is so low that it’s almost impossible to have a decent conversation.
The device also significantly heats up during the calls.
Customization:
It comes with Android 5.1 Lollipop with little to no customizations by Intex. The only customizations were in notification bar and app icons.
It, however, comes with tons of pre-installed apps such as Auto Call Record, BLE Manager, Intex Services, Intex Play, Myntra, Newshunt, MX Player, Quikr, Skype, Newshunt, among others. Some of these apps can be uninstalled to make space.
Performance:
Aqua Trent is equipped with a 1.3GHz quad-core MediaTek (MT6735) processor with 2GB of RAM and 16GB inbuilt storage. It provides support for MicroSD card up to 32GB.
Most games rendered fairly well on the device, however there’s a slight lag when you play heavy games such as Amazing Spiderman 2. Videos played well as well on the device.
The device only slightly heats up when you continuously watch videos for over 2-3 hours.
Other features:
Intex Aqua Trend is packed with Accelerometer, proximity sensor, HotKnot (which can be used to transfer files between devices with similar tech by just touching their displays), Smart Wake, among others. There are few basic things that are missing such LED notification or backlit capacity touch buttons.
While Intex has managed to launch a decent device, I wouldn’t recommend the device at its current price. If Intex drops the price by Rs 2000-2500 the device could give tough competition to other smartphones in that range.
