Karbonn Titanium S5 Ultra’s unique selling point is its 5 inch screen. And also its price. For 7,000 Rupees you are getting exactly or maybe slightly better hardware than Canvas A1 but what you are not getting is the same software support. Which has become quite a big thing in India recently. And that is not the only downside of this phone it has a few more.
Build Quality
Karbonn Titanium S5 Ultra is mainly made of plastic and well more plastic. At the back though it has the usual matte finish or rubberised back that has become like a standard around this price range. It is very slim. I don;t know the actual thickness because companies like Karbonn & Micromax hardly ever release the dimensions of their phones. But then again, they can only release the dimensions if they know themselves in the first place. If i have to guess i would say it is around 8mm thick and weighs around 150 grams. It does not have notification LED.
Display
Titanium S5 Ultra comes with 5 inches IPS LCD display of qHD resolution. It has good viewing angles. But that’s about it. You can’t expect an state of the art LCD display at this price range anyway. It looks a little dull even at full brightness. The colour reproduction of the screen is not that good. And i am guessing it has low DPI because some sharp images look slightly pixelated, not easily noticeable but still its there. At least that’s what i observed. I could be wrong though.
Camera
8MP auto focus camera of Karbonn Titanium S5 Ultra does a good job in broad day light as you can see in the photos below. But put use it in low light conditions and watch the quality go down. Again for 7,000 Rupees you can’t expect much. It takes very good quality photos in flash though. With a lot of details. It can shoot videos up-to 1080p and also you can take photos while shooting videos. It takes videos in 3GP format. It also has a 2MP front camera which takes decent photos. Decent here means it has a front facing camera, be glad.
Multimedia
It comes with a two in one music player. Two in one because its music player also has the option of FM Radio with in itself. Which is a pretty neat feature if you ask me. More manufacturers should do that. It also comes with default Android KitKat music player if you don’t like the Karbonn one. Its external quality is pretty loud and good in quality. It creates a hefty sound not shallow sound. Unfortunately its music quality in ear phones is not that good. Its not that bad either but it’s nothing exceptional and even at highest level its volume feels pretty low, it lacks the same heft in headphones that its external speaker has. And headphones that work in Android and iPhones both don’t work in this phone. Only normal earphones will work in it.
OS/Storage/RAM
Karbonn Titanium S5 Ultra comes with Android 4.4.2 KitKat out of the box, it might eventually get an update to 4.4.4, might being the keyword here. Just for the sake of completing Android KitKat timeline. But don’t expect anything after that. It runs on a customized version of Android by the way not on stock version and that is the reason it stutter sometimes.
Apart from that it comes with 1GB RAM out of which you’ll get around 400MB free to use and around 2.4GB of free internal storage out of 4GB(expandable). It doesn’t come with the option of move to SD or preferred install location. It does come with default write disk option but that is only to store/save photos taken from camera in the SD card. With default write disk option you can not save the game/app data on the SD card. That 2.4GB is all you have to install games/apps. Another downside if you are a heavy gamer or likes to keep a lot of apps stored in your phone.
Performance
Karbonn Titanium S5 Ultra runs on Mediatek MTK6582 which contains quad-core Cortex A7 processors clocked at 1.3GHz and Mali 400MP GPU. It is a very decent chipset for the price. The performance of this phone in gaming very good. It can play almost all the heavy games available in play-store without any issues. One thing i noticed though. While playing games or running benchmarks it gets noticeable hot. Let me explain a little here. All phones with a decent GPU gets warm. All.
If you put an electronic component under heavy load it will produce heat. That is perfectly normal. In some phones it is unnoticeable and in some phones it is noticeable. In Titanium S5 Ultra it is noticeable. The area around its camera section gets warm more than usual. I first noticed it when i was playing Asphalt 8 on it. It comes down to normal temperature pretty quickly after you stop playing. but still getting warmer than usual is not good for the chipset in long run.
Connectivity
Karbonn Titanium S5 Ultra is a dual sim device. It can take one full size sim and one micro sim. Network reception is decent. It supports 3G speeds up-to 21Mbps. Call quality is decent. Ear piece works fine and mic too. It also has the option of Cast screen. Apart from that it has all your usual connectivity options like Wifi, Bluetooth 4.0 and they all work fine.
Battery
Battery of this phone is 2000mAh. More than enough for the chipset. It doesn’t loose unnecessarily battery. For instance, sometimes in cheap Android phones you go to bed with full battery and at the time you woke up, you see battery half empty. That also depends on how you manage your apps too. In android phones there are a lot of apps that keep running in the background without the user even noticing.
My advice would be to turn off connectivity options like mobile data, Bluetooth, Wifi off during night. That would stop those apps from sending and receiving data. Anyway that’s general talk. Regarding this phone on normal use you can expect at least 8 hours of talk-time. On heavy use expect anything between 5-7 hours.
Verdict/Choice
If you want a smartphone with 5 inches display, decent processor, 1GB RAM and a decent camera under 7,000 Rupees then this phone might suit you. Otherwise in this price range currently there’s nothing that can beat Android One smartphones in user-friendliness. Karbonn Titanium S5 Ultra’s storage restrictions could become a headache for some. So, anyway that was my short and sweet verdict and now its your turn to make the sweet sweet choice.