iball andi 4.5h review

It runs on Android 4.0.4 and you get a vanilla Ice Cream Sandwich experience. An addition in the Andi 4.5h that wasn’t present in the Andi 5c is the Personalization option under settings. Using this you can have as many as 8 target apps on the lockscreen. You can even add individual contacts directly onto the lock screen. This option really speeds up a lot of things. There are 5 homescreens, as is seen on most Android 4.0 phones and it offers standard ICS fare in terms of folders, widgets and so on.

It has an IPS panel LCD display. It is scratch-resistant but the same can’t be said about its resistant to smudges. But that is not much of an issue as the smudges are only visible if the screen goes completely dark.

Performance

Call quality on the Andi 4.5h is quite good with decent volume levels and optimum sound clarity. We only noticed a couple of call drops while in transit, otherwise the phone works quite well with calls if you are not moving around much. But we did not like the delay in response when you click on the End Call icon. There were a lot of times where we felt the call hadn’t ended and due to multiple presses, ended up dialling a new number after the End Call screen disappeared. We don’t see any point of the phone having to get rid of the calling screen 2-3 seconds after you have clicked on End Call.

The display is one of the best parts about this phone. The screen despite being reflective is still readable under sunlight on adjusting the brightness unlike the iBall Andi 5c which was unreadable under sunlight at any level of brightness. The backlight bleeding which was quite prominent on the Andi 5c is fortunately not as prominent. It’s visible only if you are looking at the phone closely along its plane. While viewing it normally you will not notice any backlight bleeding.
Watching movies on the phone is a pleasure. Blacks aren’t as deep as we would have liked, but it is still a much better display than the Andi 5c. Thanks to the high resolution, text is rendered quite beautifully and we did not have any strain reading long online articles or e-books.

The stock keyboard although decent is quite cramped when compared with the 5-inch phablets. We did end up making a lot of mistakes while typing speedily. Despite installing Swiftkey 3, you do tend to make a lot of mistakes. Your typing speed will surely take a hit and will require some getting used to.

The touch response was quite fluid and we did not notice any jitters while swiping speedily between screens. We did not notice any slowdown or lag despite running a lot of apps in the background thanks to the dual-core processor. Most of the apps ran as expected and we did not notice any untoward behaviour. Games such as Angry Birds, Fruit Ninja and Asphalt were quite smooth and there wasn’t any lag.

Talking about synthetic benchmarks, the Andi 4.5h aced in quite a lot of tests but was taken over by others in the rest. The MagiconmNote was the only phone that was consistently performing better than the iBall Andi 4.5h, but it’s a 5-inch phablet. The real apples to apples comparison will come when we compare it with the Karbonn A21 which has similar specs. We will update those scores.