Lava Iris 406Q is one of those smartphones that anyone could miss easily. Not because it is small in size but because it is made b Lava. Not a well known company in India. Even its price is less than most of the phones available with similar specs. There is no phone literally available below 7,000 Rupees in the market which has 1GB of RAM and Quadcore Cortex A7 processor with Adreno 302GPU, Snapdragon chipset. The specs of this phone looks to good to be true, but they are. It is not perfect though, it has some flaws, like its camera. I am going tell you about all of that and more in this review.
Hardware, Design & Screen
This phone is pretty solidly built it doesn’t creek or bends. It’s entirely made of glossy plastic. It’s a fingerprint magnet. Very small in size thanks to its 4 inches screen. 10.3mm thick. Its back has a little texture on it, which gives it a pretty classy look. The back is slightly curved of this phone it’s not totally flat. The loud speaker of this phone is in the front i.e, the ear piece is its loud speaker.
It has got a 4 inches IPS display with WVGA resolution and very, very horrible viewing angles. Yes, you read that despite of having an IPS display it’s screen still has very poor viewing angles. And the colour looks over saturated but thankfully it has options to improve that in display settings. You can see how to do that in review video below.
Multimedia & Storage
It’s got a a very old Gingerbread music player. Have Snapdragon audio settings. Music quality in earphones is pretty mediocre. If you turn the volume all up, the sounds starts to distort. Speaker quality is average, not that loud. It can play 1080p videos by default without any problems.
Storage wise it has 4GB ROM but that is only on the paper. It only has under 1GB of internal storage available for the user. And 2.5 GB is reserved for ‘phone storage’. Don’t know what’s that exactly. You can’t install games above 1GB on this phone. It a;so has move to sd and preferred install location options. But no matter what option you choose it will still download the remaining app data on the internal storage, which is under 1GB. Hence making this phone useless for those whom wants this phone only to install and play big games. It’s still a good buy for casual users though, those whom don’t care about big games that much.
Camera
It has got a 5MP rear facing camera with LED flash and VGA front facing camera. The quality of the front facing camera pretty bad but that’s expected because of its low resolution but surprisingly the quality of its rear facing camera is not that good either. It does not have touch to focus or auto focus, i don’t think it has any kind of focus. But it has. It is a fixed focus camera. There is lot of noise and graininess in the shots taken by this phone as you can see in the still images below. All in all pictures look unclear and very out of focus. Frankly speaking the quality is very bad. You can see all its setting and more in the review video.
It can only shoot videos upto 720p i.e, HD resolution. Only in 3GP format. The quality is not that bad though unlike still images the video quality is pretty decent. The video sample is in the review video below.
Connectivity
Connectivity wise this little phone is pretty jam packed. It has got dual sims(normal size sims), 3G, WiFi. Bluetooth. It does not support USB OTG. It loses wifi connectivity sometimes when you go out of the room in which your WiFi router is situated. Due to it’s loud speaker which is also the ear piece of this phone, it has incredibly loud and clear voice quality, mic quality is decent too.
Performance & OS
Performance of this phone is pretty decent looking at the price point of this phone. I would call it great. You can’t ask for more around this price range. Although, it gets a little slow sometimes while scrolling and multitasking between apps, it doesn’t crash though. Thanks to its 1GB of RAM. It gets a little slow while web browsing you can see that in the review video below. It runs on Snapdragon 200 chipset which has Quadcore Cortex A7 processor clocked at 1.2Ghz and 302 GPU.
It can run most games given that you are able to install them in the first place. While playing games that are a little graphics heavy. It gets a little hot around its camera section. It runs on Android 4.3 JellyBean and Lava has guaranteed Android 4.4(Kitkat) update for this phone some time in the future.
Battery life
It has got 1700mAh lithium polymer battery. Small in capacity just like the dimensions of this phone. You can blow it all in 5 hours by continuously playing games and web browsing or you can save it like uncle scrooge and use it for all day. I am not gonna type more about this because it’s upto you how you preserve your battery. It comes with an app called “Batteryguru” which is made by Snapdragon itself, it could help you a little in saving the battery.
Choice
Honestly speaking i was so excited about this phone. But not anymore as it had left to much to be desired. It has got the specs and price right but it just couldn’t deliver on ‘value for money’ that i always look for. Its bad camera quality and limited storage leaves too much to be desired. This phone doesn’t even have a big brand name behind it. Buy this phone only if you want to have ‘everything’ inside your phone but don’t care about the quality of that ‘everything’. The only quality thing this phone has is the Snapdragon chipset but that alone is not enough to make someone buy a phone. All of this is just my opinion though, like i always say, the choice will be yours in the end. I can just help you decide.