Karbonn Titanium Octane Plus – The Best Budget Smartphone Can Offer
Karbonn has been around in the Indian smartphone scene for a while and it has made its presence felt with some really good devices. Now it has announced three new devices. The octa core Karbonn Titanium Octane and Octane Plus and the hexa core Karbonn Titanium Hexa. These devices are pretty impressive and boast powerful hardware at a very competitive price. Among these devices, the Titanium Octane Plus has the most powerful hardware with an octa core processor, plenty of RAM and a high resolution camera. The device is also very well built and looks premium. We dig a bit deeper to find out what this super phone at a budget is like.
Design
The device measures 147.3 x 72.6 x 7.6 mm and is quite light. The length of the device is a bit extra if we compare it to the 5 inch devices coming out these days. This is because of the wide band that houses the capacitive keys for menu, home and back. The device is made out of matte plastic and it well built for a mid range device. For now it was showcased in black but more colours might come out once the device is in the stores. The device has a simple rectangular design which is rounded at the top edges and sharp at the bottom edges. The back is simple with just the camera and flash on its back. The camera is protruding out of the panel and sticks out a bit. This prevents the device from lying flat when placed on a hard surface. You might also end up scratching the silver ring surrounding the camera if you keep your device mostly on a hard surface. The device is slim and is easy to hold. One handed operations might not be possible for everyone though. The weight of the device is kept well in control which makes handling it easy.
Display
The phone has got a full HD 5 inch display. The full HD resolution gives it a pixel density of 441 pixels per inch which is in line with many high end devices out there. We have seen some really impressive displays on some other Karbonn device and this one doesn’t disappoint either. It has a really impressive colour replication and the viewing angles are just superb. The gamma and contrast are pretty good too and the brightness is even throughout the panel. At high brightness, the display is easily readable even in bright sunlight.
Hardware
This phone runs on a powerful Mediatek MT6592 chipset. It has an octa core processor running eight Cortex A7 cores at a maximum clock speed of 1.7 GHz. The graphics are handled by a Mali 450MP4 GPU. The hardware is good enough to handle the largest of apps and the hungriest of games that the play store can offer. Apps launch quickly, and thanks to the powerful hardware, continue to run butter smooth.
It has got 2 GB of RAM and 16 GB of internal storage. It has got an option to add more memory via a micro SD card and it can support memory cards up to 32 GB. This is a dual SIM device and the 3G network can give you download speeds up to 42.2 Mbps. You get Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n and Bluetooth 4.0 for connectivity. It has got a micro USB 2.0 port for data transfers. While they have done everything right with the phone, they have compromised with the battery capacity in quest of making it slim and light. They have used a really tiny battery (tiny by the device’s standards) of just 2000 mAh. It would be drained in jiffy when the phone is at resource hungry jobs like gaming. The full HD display itself would take up a large fraction of battery charge during everyday usage. They should have used a bigger battery here to ensure decent battery life.
Camera
The device has got a primary camera with an impressive resolution of 16 megapixels. This puts it against the likes of Micromax Knight. The camera is impressive though not as good as the ones offered by international manufacturers. Still it can compete with many mid range devices and beat them fair and square. The high resolution makes up for many minor flaws as it gives you some scope to process the images later on your laptop. The images that you get from this camera are pretty good when the subject is well lit. It can capture details very well at times if you use the touch focus properly. The images are processed very fast and the camera is ready to shoot the next one in a jiffy. The powerful processor and graphics processor really help here.
The front camera has an insane resolution of 8 megapixels. That is a really high resolution for a front camera. No doubt it is a decent performer but what is the point of an eight megapixel front camera. Not that you are going to shoot landscape photographs with that. If you are going to use the camera for making video calls, a 1.3 or 2 megapixel shooter is more than enough to do the job. The camera interface is stock android and you would find the features that you would see on vanilla android.
Software
The device runs the latest version of android, 4.4.2 Kit Kat. They have made some changes to the interface but it would take you a while to notice them. There are not many useless apps preinstalled on the device and even if there are any, you can simply disable them and prevent them from eating up the free RAM while your device boots up. They have added some smart controls as well that work fine.
Verdict
Karbonn has improved a lot in the recent years and this Karbonn Titanium Octane Plus is one fine example. It looks premium, has got a great display and has a powerful hardware. It is available for an attractive price of Rs. 17990.