Indian startup company, Smartron hasn’t had much of success with its first smartphone, the Smartron t.phone. While it offered top notch hardware, decent design, and acceptable cameras, the insane price tag was a bit of a letdown.
Exactly after a year, the Sachin Tendulkar backed company has launched a new phone in the name of the legend itself- srt.phone that indicates Sachin Ramesh Tendulkar. This time around, the company has priced the device on a competitive note with the price starting at Rs. 12,999.
The Smartron srt.phone flaunts a 5.5-inch display with a resolution of 1920 x 1080 pixels. At the heart of the phone is a Qualcomm Snapdragon 652 chip paired with Adreno 510 GPU to take care of graphics. The phone comes with 4GB of RAM and 32GB/64GB internal storage.
The device comes with a 13MP primary camera with f/2.0 aperture, autofocus with PDAF, and BIS sensor. It also has a 5MP wide-angle selfie camera.
One of the biggest announcements at the srt.phone event was about the device’s software section. The phone is laden with Android 7.1.1 Nougat right out of the box. And Smartron promises three major Android updates along with monthly security patches. For a startup company, it’s a problem to provide timely software updates, but Smartron seems to make itself an exception from this. Only time will tell about the company’s claims, though.
The only let down with the phone is the smaller 3000mAh battery there’s no mentioning of fast charging technology either. The specifications of the device are competitive, at least on paper, but… it has to deal with rivals.
Various challenges are looming in the form of Xiaomi Redmi Note 4, Coolpad Cool 1 Dual, and Moto G5 Plus. The Redmi Note 4 and Moto G5 Plus have a less powerful yet battery efficient Snapdragon 625 chip built on 14nm manufacturing process. The Coolpad Cool 1 Dual uses the same Snapdragon 652 chip, but it has a dual camera at the back. The Honor 6X comes with Huawei’s in-house octa-core Kirin 655 chip, and it also has a dual camera at the rear.
The Moto G5 Plus’s USP is its rear camera, which is the same camera sensor used on the Samsung Galaxy S7. Plus, you can’t forget Motorola’s timely software updates. The Redmi Note 4 has a beefy 4100mAh and is available at a cutthroat price. All these four phones have metal bodies, whereas the srt.phone has a plastic body. Nonetheless, it has a removable back, which all of the above phones lack.
As you can see every phone has some unique feature, but the Smartron srt.phone lacks that. Even though it promises software updates, it can’t be justified immediately. Also, Smartron should have priced the device around Rs. 10,000, which would have made it the clear winner. In fact, the LYF Water F1s has similar specifications and is priced under Rs. 8,000.
