LYF Wind 1 and Jio 4G VoLTE : total mismatch

LYF Wind  1 is a budget smartphone from Reliance and is powered by Snapdragon 410. We got hold of the LYF Wind 1 as part of Reliance Jio preview offer. The Wind 1 has 1GB of RAM and 16GB of storage onboard. The display is 5″in size with 1280 x 720 pixel resolution. The battery is rated at 2300mAh. Priced at INR 6,799/- the Wind 1 is available across various online and retail stores across India. Here is our review of the budget smartphone designed for Reliance Jio network.

Unboxing and Design

The Wind 1 weighs 125 grams (just as much as the iPhone 6) but the phone feels extremely light. We thought that this is a sub -100 gram phone. The build quality is nothing to boast about. The phone is made fully from plastic and it is very easy to break the phone (like a KitKat) into two. The USB port and 3.5mm audio port are at the top. The volume rocker is on the left side and the power key is on the right hand side. The back panel is removable and underneath, there is a removable battery, two SIM card slots (both are micro SIM card slots) and a microSD card slot. The antennae are at the bottom (below the speaker) and on either side of sim/sd card slots. The rear camera is 8mp shooter while the front facing camera is a 5mp shooter. At the bottom, there is a teeny weeny speaker. The back panel has a nice grainy texture (that we often see on walls). The pearl white color and the texture does give the phone a clean look. Below the display, there are three (usual) capacitive buttons.  The microphone hole is at the bottom of the phone.

The display has 1280×720 pixel resolution but when placed next to the iPhone 6 (760p), the display on Wind 1 pales a lot. We have a LeEco 1S Eco phone at home and when the two phones are kept next to each other, the Wind 1 felt like a lot cheaper phone. The stock launcher and wallpaper made the Wind 1 display look extremely cheap. Once we installed NOVA launcher and setup a bright and colorful wallpaper, Wind 1 display looked a lot lot better. For some reason, almost all the pre-loaded apps looked pale and gave cheap look to the phone. If you are going to use a LYF phone, we suggest you to replace all stock default apps with better ones. The touch sensitivity of the display is nothing to boast about. The touch response too is below average.

Key Specification

• CPU : Qualcomm Snapdragon 410
• Storage : 1GB RAM ; 16GB storage
• Display : 720p 5″display
• Battery : 2300mAh Lithium Polymer
• OS : Android 5.1.1
• Camera : 8mp rear camera and 5mp front facing camera
• SIM : dual micro-SIM card slots
• Memory expansion : microSD card slot
• Box content : handset, headset, wall charger and USB cable

Performance

Kabhi laggy, kabhi snappy. This is the phrase that describe the performance of the Wind 1.Sometimes the phone feels excruciatingly slow and sometimes the phone is snappy. At home, the Wi-Fi connection keeps dropping (combination of a Chinese router and budget droid?) and it took an effort to install all necessary applications.

One may say that, given the specs, we should not expect snappy and fast performance. But a Jio connection on a phone like LeEco 1S or Lenovo K5 or Coolpad Note 3 would be amazing experience. With 4G LTE and 25GB of data per month, there is lot of data to consume but not enough power to process data. Reliance should have added another gigabyte of RAM for this phone (would’ve made huge difference). Take Asphalt Nitro for example. When we tried to start the first race, it took a while for the race to load and during the race, the gameplay was not butter smooth.

Here is a list of benchmarks that we did for your reference

• AnTuTu Score : 27204
• Geekbench 3 single core : 491
• Geekbench 3 multi core : 1423
• Quadrant : 13519
• Vellamo Browser: 1937
• Vellamo Metal :

User Interface

The phone comes with Android Lollipop 5.1.1 pre-loaded and there is no customization done by LYF/Reliance to the stock Android UI. There are quite a few pre-loaded apps (Jio Suite of apps, most of these are pretty useful as they give access to the Jio ecosystem, Batteryguru, Asphalt Nitro, spiderman ultimate, gapps. )

There are no built in gestures, no double tap to wake or other useful add-ons that competing brands are implementing. Most of the default applications are stock android applications. In one way, this is a good thing as we have seen some brands trying too much to alter Android and making the OS unusable.

Here is a weird thing. When you try to open any of the pre-loaded Jio apps, you get a message that the suite is out of date and then when you approve ‘update’ request, you get two folders of MyJio containing two versions of each application. On close look, the second folder is not exactly a folder but it’s an application with links to each Jio application. Applications like MyJio, JioPlay, JioBeats, NetVelocity are very useful as they give you access to TV programs, movies, music, books. NetVelocity shows network speed, strength etc while MyJio gives you details like calls made, data consumption etc. One bug is that though you get to see per session data usage, the app does not show ‘total data usage’. After some playing around, found out that clicking on ‘accoutn statement’ shows current voice/sms/data usage.

Multimedia and Camera

The audio quality if the wind 1 is below average. The earpiece is of shoddy quality and completely negates the supposed excellent audio quality that Jio is supposed to bring. The bundled earpiece is also very basic. Good that the phone supports FM radio. Music playback is below average too. We do not know what audio chip is used, the songs felt muddled (be it via YouTube of Jio Beats or local music playback) and lacked clarity.

The loudspeaker is placed at the back and it’s barely audible when the phone is place in sound absorbing surface like mattress or pillow.

Camera is in line with other phones under 7k. Photos looks average under bright sunlight and grainy under low light conditions. Wind 1 can record videos at 720p resolution.

Battery

With normal usage, the phone can easily last through the day. Given that there isn’t much of hardware that drain battery (high resolution display or powerful CPU), you can expect very good battery life from the Wind 1. If you start watching live TV or movies on this phone ,the battery will drain pretty fast.

Conclusion

Wind 1 is a decent phone for those who want to use it for calling and messaging with occasional access to social networks and is also the most VFM phone among LYF lineup. Reliance Jio on the other hand emphasises on HD voice quality, high speed data access and Wind 1 is not the right phone for Jio. Even if you want to use this phone on another plain old 3G/2G network, there are better phones available for similar price. When you remove the clause ‘Jio works only on LYF phones’, Wind 1 falls well short of competition. Reliance Jio is all about data consumption and this is not the right phone. If you are one of those who consume lot of data (videos, music, games and multitasking), do look elsewhere. The audio quality is below average, earpiece quality is lousy and it negates the HD voice quality that the network provides. Multi tasking is difficult given the low amount if  RAM (by Android standards).