NEW MOBILE: Xolo Q700 review

Xolo has recently started offering affordable quad-core smartphones under its 'Q series'. The first smartphone in this series was the Xolo Q800. Recently the company added the Q700 to the list. The Xolo Q700 is priced at Rs. 9,999 and runs on Android 4.2 (Jelly Bean).

In this review we try to find out whether this smartphone is a worth the bucks or has Xolo cut corners to deliver a sub-Rs. 10,000 offering.

Hardware/ Design
Xolo as a company is known for launching good looking smartphones such as Xolo X1000 and Xolo A1000. We were pleasantly surprised that the company did not comprise on the design and build quality for their under Rs. 10,000 smartphone either.

The Xolo X700 does not offer a path breaking design, sporting a rectangular frame with rounded corners. It comes with 4.5-inch qHD display, which has an edge-to-edge glass. The smartphone seems to be just the right size, neither too large nor too small. The device is 10.2mm thick, so it is not going to fit in the category of the size zero smartphones doing the round. The smartphone weighs 151.3 grams but does not feel too heavy.


The body of Xolo Q700 is made primarily of plastic and its back has a rubberised finish, which helps in giving this smartphone a premium look and also makes it easy to hold.

The volume rocker is placed on the right panel while the power/ standby button is on the left panel. The top panel houses the USB port and 3.5mm jack. The front panel also has three capacitive buttons for Menu, Home and Back. However, these buttons are not backlit, which makes them difficult to use in dark.

Display
The Xolo Q700 comes with 4.5-inch qHD (540 x960 pixels) OGS IPS display capable of showing 16M colours.

The resolution and the viewing angles are good for a smartphone worth Rs. 10,000. You can easily read texts, browse pictures and watch YouTube videos on this screen.



Under sun visibility on the Xolo Q700 is average and the screen used in this smartphone is reflective. The downside of this screen is that it is a finger print magnet and even prone to scratches. However, the company has bundled in a screen guard along with the purchase of this smartphone.

The touchscreen on the Xolo Q700 is fairly responsive.

Camera
The Xolo Q700 packs in a 5-megapixel rear camera with Back Side Illumination (BSI) sensor. The pictures captured through this camera in the broad day light are good. The images are sharp and the colour reproduction seems to be good.


However, the same cannot be said for the low-light shots. The camera is also capable of capturing videos at 720p HD resolution, which are of average quality.

The smartphone also comes with 0.3-megapixel front camera for capturing self-images and doing video chats. The images clicked through the same are grainy.

Software/ Interface
The Xolo Q700 runs on Android 4.2 (Jelly Bean) out of the box. Hence, one can enjoy many features such as lock screen widgets, Day dream, Quick Settings, et al, which are not available on Android 4.1 (Jelly Bean).


There are five customisable home screens to fill with apps and widgets. The lock screen and the setting menu of the Xolo Q700 looks pretty much like on any other stock Android smartphone. However, the app categories on this smartphone have been tweaked slightly. The apps are listed under four major heads Main, Apps, Games and Widgets, as opposed to having just two main categories for Apps and Widgets.

The company has not pre-loaded many apps on this smartphone but one can download all that you need from the Google Play store. Xolo has bundled in some of its own apps such as Xolo Care, Xolo Power, Xolo Secure and Xolo Switch on this smartphone.

The Xolo Care app was also pre-installed on some of the previous Xolo smartphones that we have reviewed. Its primary function is to help access the customer care in a jiffy. However, the apps Xolo Power and Xolo Switch have been introduced for the first time with this smartphone.

With the help of the Xolo Power app you can manage the battery of the Xolo Q700 in a better fashion. The Xolo Power app gives an estimated battery back that the user will get based on the applications that are currently running. It also suggests the battery you can save by cutting one or more apps or connectivity options. The app also comes with a 'Low battery mode'. If you enable this mode, then the smartphone will disables Wi-Fi, data GPS, Bluetooth and reduces screen brightness to converse battery, when the battery is about to drain off.


As the name suggests Xolo Secure app is an app that helps in keeping your smartphone protected. It helps in locking your smartphone and to track it remotely in case it is lost.

With the help of the Xolo Switch app, you can create multiple profiles on the smartphone and easily switch between them. The app also comes with a kid mode, which can be switched on.

The smartphone also comes with an app called Kids Tube, which filters content on YouTube and only shows content fit to be viewed by children.

Performance/ Battery Life
The Xolo Q700 is powered by a 1.2GHz quad-core MediaTek 6589M processor with PowerVR SGX544 GPU. The smartphone also packs in 1GB of RAM and 4GB of internal storage, out of which 2.70 GB is user accessible.

The smartphone functions smoothly while performing routine tasks and navigating through menus. The smartphone is also capable of handling a bit of multi-tasking. Playing popular games such as Subway Surfer, Temple Run 2 and Fruit Ninja is a pleasant experience.


The Xolo Q700 comes with a native Android browser, which renders web pages well.

The Xolo Q700 is also does a good job playing back audios and videos from the microSD card. The audio quality through speakers is good but average through headphones. The native video player on board did not support MP4 videos. However, this problem can be fixed by downloading an app from the Google Play.

The call quality on the smartphone is satisfactory.

The smartphone features a 2,400mAh battery, which we think gives an impressive battery backup. Based on our usage, the smartphone is easily able to last almost a day and half on a single charge. With medium to heavy usage, including 2-2.5 hours of phone calls, about 30 minutes of Skype call, one Gmail account with push notifications, screen at maximum brightness, Twitter and Facebook notifications and WhatsApp chats, the Xolo Q700 lasted good 30-31 hours.

It's also worth pointing out that we had turned on Wi-Fi and switched off auto-brightness. Altering these settings and using the Xolo Power app might help in running the phone for a longer duration, depending on your usage pattern.


Verdict
In our mind the Xolo Q700 is a great value for money proposition. The smartphone offers a good battery backup, looks sophisticated for a Rs. 10,000 phone and has a decent display. The only real disappoint for this smartphone comes from the camera department, which does not perform too well especially in low light.

If you are looking for options other than the Q700, you might want to check out the Sony Xperia E dual (Review | Pictures). This smartphone has a better brand name but you will have to comprise in screen size and battery performance.

You can also check out Micromax's Canvas 2 (Review | Pictures) and Karbonn S1 Titanium. However, Karbonn S1 Titanium (Review ) is about a Rs. 1,000 more expensive than the Xolo offering.

Pros

Good design and build
Good battery back-up
Cons

Underwhelming camera
Price: Rs. 9,990

Ratings (Out of 5)

Design: 3.5
Display: 3
Performance: 3.5
Software: 4.5
Battery Life: 4
Value for Money: 4
Camera: 2.5
Overall: 3.5

Seagate Wireless Plus review

Seagate recently announced two new products in the Indian market. While Seagate Central is designed to be the storage hub of your home/ small office network, Seagate Wireless Plus aims to offer portable, wireless storage on the go. At Rs. 16,000 for 1TB storage, Seagate Wireless Plus may sound expensive and the question is, do you get enough value in return? Let's find out.

Design/ Setup

Seagate Wireless Plus looks like any other portable hard disk from the outside, although it's slightly wider and heavier in order to accommodate the extra circuitry needed to provide wireless access and power backup. It comes with two indicator lights - a charging/ low battery indicator, and the broadcast LED that lights up when the drive is ready to accept Wi-Fi connections.

The drive comes with just the power button on one side and a proprietary charging connector on the other. The bundled charger is rated at 5V/ 2A, and it takes a little over 3 hours to fully charge the hard disk when it has no juice left. The drive can also be charged via USB, but that takes considerably longer.

Setting up the drive is pretty simple, thanks to the accompanying Quick Start Guide. Switch on the power button and wait for the broadcast LED to turn from blinking to solid blue. Though the Quick Start Guide says this may take up to a minute, in our experience this took less than 15 seconds every time we powered on the drive.

Next step is to download the Seagate Media app from App Store or Google Play on to your iPhone, iPod touch, iPad or Android smartphone. Once the app is installed, do not launch it right away, and first connect your device to the Wi-Fi network titled Seagate Wireless. Once you're connected, launch the app, where a brief tutorial will walk you through all the essentials.

In case you are wondering how you are supposed to stay connected with the world if you are connected to this Wi-Fi network, there's mixed news. If you are near a Wi-Fi network (say office or home), you can configure your Wireless Plus to connect to this Wi-Fi connection and you can continue to enjoy Internet access, even as you are hooked to the Seagate drive. However, if you are on the move, which is very likely given this is a portable drive, you're out of luck, since you'll be unable to use your phone's 2G/ 3G data connection while you're connected to the Wireless Plus over Wi-Fi. You could solve this by getting a mobile Wi-Fi hotspot, but that's a topic for another day.

You can connect your PC/ Mac to the Wireless Plus over Wi-Fi or via USB, just like any other hard disk (USB 3.0 is supported), and load up on media. Transfer speeds are average; comparable to other regular portable drives. The hard disk is pre-formatted with NTFS but you can format it as HFS if you will be using it only on a Mac. If you'll use it on a PC as well as a Mac, or just PC, leave the drive as it is. Seagate has wisely bundled a copy of Paragon NTFS that Mac users can install to write to this drive, even if it¹s NTFS-formatted. If this sounds like jargon, you probably don¹t need to worry about this stuff at all - Seagate installer will guide you through the steps when you connect the drive for the first time.

Usage/ Performance

The Seagate Media app on your mobile device is at the centre-stage of your Wireless Plus experience. The app lets you browse the content of your Wireless Plus under tabs titled Videos, Photos, Music and Documents. The app plays most popular video formats, though it has to download stuff from the Internet to enable playback for some formats, which it does with minimum fuss. We were able to stream two full-HD movies simultaneously off the drive without experiencing any sort of buffering delays.

The Music player comes with playlist support, while Photos let you view slideshows, amongst other things. Documents lets you browse other kinds of files, though you must have third-party apps installed on the device to view/ edit them. The iOS app comes with AirPlay support to stream movies/ music to Apple TV, Airport Express or other AirPlay-compliant devices.

You can even upload stuff from the mobile device to the hard disk, from within the app. For example, we used the app to backup the precious photos we clicked on the iPhone straight to the drive, all over Wi-Fi.

The app comes with a host of settings that let you control the drive. For starters, there's an option to password-protect the Seagate Wireless Wi-Fi network (recommended) or to change the network name (SSID). You can also check for firmware updates, or even restart the drive or put it to sleep - very handy, if the drive is sitting, say, when you are done watching the movie and the drive is sitting in your backpack. The app also informs you about the number of clients that are connected to the drive right now and the amount of juice remaining in the drive.

Seagate rates Wireless Plus at 10 hours of usage, though we got around 6 hours of continuous video playback to a single wireless client with default settings. There's also a Stream and Download mode, on by default, that copies the entire movie at one go and puts the drive in sleep mode, preserving battery life. However, this didn't seem to work for very big files like full-HD content.

Seagate claims that up to 3 users can stream videos from the Wireless Plus simultaneously, while it can accept a total of 8 wireless connections (for, say, browsing the contents of the drive or viewing pictures). We tested both claims and found them to be true.

However, the Seagate Media app is not without its quirks. Some of the icons aren't exactly intuitive, for example, it took us a while to figure out how to select items for copying, since the icon intended for this is the one that usually means 'Share' in iOS. The app, while it does the job, is unlikely to win any design awards. Further, the Android version of the app doesn't always do a very good job remembering the position you were at in a movie when you switch away. We switched away the app for a few seconds to answer an urgent email, and came back to find the app stuttering for a while, only to start playing the movie from the beginning. On other occasions, it worked as expected, and resumed the movie from where we left.

Seagate Wireless Plus comes with DLNA support, so DLNA compatible players should be able to stream content straight off the box. As expected, the Gallery app on our HTC One X+ instantly recognised the Wireless Plus as a Media Server. Though Seagate ships only iOS and Android apps, you can browse the contents of the drive from virtually any device, by pointing your browser to the drive. This way you can play videos on your Nokia, BlackBerry or Windows Phone device, provided the browser supports playing videos in that format.

Verdict

Seagate Wireless Plus is the successor to the company's popular GoFlex Satellite drive, and an improvement in all respects, including twice the storage (1TB compared to 500GB), increased battery life (rated at 10 hours compared to 7 hours for GoFlex Satellite), improved range (80 metres compared to 45 metres) and is more compact than its predecessor. The drive is the first portable, wireless storage option in India to offer 1TB of storage, and we recommend it to anyone looking to carry a massive media collection on the move.

Samsung Galaxy Note III purported image spotted online

A leaked image that has surfaced on the Internet is being dubbed as a prototype of the Samsung Note III.
The image leaked by a Twitter handle PunkPanda, shows only a corner of the device. From what we can see, it seems like a shape similar to the Galaxy Note II. If we notice the status icons on the top bar, they do not seem to be similar to what Samsung usually has in its TouchWiz UI. Rather, these icons are closer to what we see in stock Android.

This is not the first time that an image of Note III has leaked. If we go back to the image leaked previously, it looks closer to the original Galaxy Note rather than the Galaxy Note II. Also, that device showed TouchWiz UI like status icons in the top bar. The positioning of the front facing camera is also closer to the speaker grill in the recent leak. So, make what you will of the two leaks.

Previous rumours state that the 6-inch phablet will be powered by a Snapdragon 800 chipset. The Snapdragon 800 chipset has a quad-core Krait 400 processor that supports clock speeds of up to 2.3GHz. If is also expected that the device will have a full HD AMOLED display. Samsung Galaxy Note III is rumoured to support Bluetooth 4.0, 02.11a/b/g/n/ac (2.4/5 GHz), GSM (GPRS, EDGE), W-CDMA/UMTS (HSDPA, HSUPA, HSPA+, DC-HSPA+ cat.29), MBMS, LTE cat.4, CDMA2000 connectivity options.

Recently, a leaked EXIF file on Picasa Japan revealed that the device will come with a 13-megapixel camera.

With multiple rumours already circulating about the forthcoming phablet, it is difficult to settle on what the actual device could be like.

The successor to Samsung's Galaxy Note II is expected to be launched at IFA in September.