Lava, the company which has been focusing primarily on the budget smartphone segment until now, has made its foray into the premium segment with its new addition – Lava Iris 504Q.
After covering the launch of this phone earlier, we bring to you a more detailed look at what the new quad-core Lava Iris 504Q has to offer.
Lava Iris 504Q Specifications:
Design
With dimensions of 140X73X8 mm, the Iris 504Q is somewhat Galaxy S4-esque in the thickness department. The front has a now-common 5″ display with a 1280X720 pixels resolution. Other entities up front are 3 capacitive touch buttons for navigation, a VGA front camera for video calling and a speaker. The primary camera is 8 MP accompanied by an LED flash. This phone joins the elite club populated by very few phones in India that have a HD display like the A116 (which got Android 4.2.1 Jelly Bean update recently) and iBall Andi 4.7G.
Processor
The Iris 504Q is powered by a Media Tek MT6589 chipset implementing Cortex A7 ARM architecture (this is the world’s first chipset to implement the Coretx A7 SoC). The CPU is a quad-core clocked at 1.2 GHz and graphics and gaming are bolstered by a PowerVR Series5XT GPU. Multitasking should be okay with a 1 GB RAM.
Camera
There is an 8 MP shooter aided with an LED Flash. The phone also has capabilities of recording 1080p videos. The secondary camera is a 2MP shooter. In spite of being listed as an 8MP, it remains to be seen whether it will deliver the complete experience of all those mega pixels. Cameras of some Indian phones are notoriously known for below-par performance.
The phone runs stock Android Jelly Bean 4.1.2 which is the latest bug-free Android version. The lack of customization of the OS is not singular to Lava alone and it would do for these companies to take a leaf out of Samsung/HTC’s book and build beautiful UIs like Touchwiz and HTC Sense.
Lava Iris 504Q Air-gesture
One of the most intriguing and currently unique features of the Lava Iris 504Q is the air-gesture support that is included. This means you can navigate your way through various apps on your phone like changing through playlists, swiping away radio stations and pushing through photos in the gallery just by hovering your hand over the phone without any touching involved. How cool is that? Smartphones are getting increasingly hands-free these days.
Music Player, Memory, Battery
Working towards adding a touch of originality to the phone, Lava has developed it’s own Fusion player apart from the default music player app on Android. The device has built-in memory of 4 GB and this can be expanded up to 32 GB externally. The battery is a 2000 mAh offering which is frankly not comfortably abundant for a day’s usage with a basic 4-5 hours of talk-time.
Lava Iris 504Q pricing and availability
The phone will hit stores by the end of June with a price tag of Rs.13,499. At this price point, the phone competes directly with Micromax’s popular Canvas series of phones.
The competition is getting tougher and tougher in the domestic market as it is getting increasingly difficult to shake Micromax off the throne as the leading Indian maker of smartphones. Having posted a turnover of Rs.965 crores, Lava has set itself a target of selling 15 lakh handsets by October’13. Even running doubly fast would not be enough since Micromax is already warming up to the race with the impending release of it’s next flagship, the Micromax Canvas 4.
