A couple of days ago, we posted our review on Intex Aqua Crystal smartphone, which is a mid-range smartphone, launched recently in India. Along with the Intex Aqua Crystal, Intex also launched two more smartphones in their latest Aqua series; Intex Aqua 4.0 & Intex Aqua Supreme+, where Intex Aqua 4.0 is the low-end smartphone & Aqua Supreme+ is the high-end smartphone, while Aqua Crystal remains in between both of them. Since we're done reviewing Intex Aqua Crystal smartphone, it's time to review the top-most model from the series, Intex Aqua Supreme+ smartphone.
About a week ago, Intex sent us the Intex Aqua Supreme+ & Aqua Crystal smartphones from their Aqua series and today we're going to review the Intex Aqua Supreme+. We've already reviewed Intex Aqua Crystal smartphone, you can read it by visiting this link. We've been using Intex Aqua Supreme+ for more than a week now and have decided to share our experience through an individual review of both the devices, this one is for the Intex Aqua Supreme+ smartphone.
Unboxing
Intex Aqua Supreme+ had a box similar to Aqua Crystal, the Intex Aqua series smartphones come in a similar kind of boxes, which is rectangular in shape, the cover slides open revealing the box, which contains the smartphone & accessories. On opening the box, you'll see the Intex Aqua Supreme+ smartphone lying inside, underneath the smartphone, are the accessories. Intex Aqua Crystal comes with a Charging Adapter, a MicroUSB cable, Earphones, Transparent Hard Plastic case, a Screen protector, SIM ejection tool and finally a User manual. You can watch the unboxing video on our YouTube channel.
Design
Unlike the glass finish back of Intex Aqua Crystal, the Intex Aqua Supreme+ smartphone comes with a plastic back and sides. The smartphone is 7.9 mm in thickness and weighs 133 grams, even lighter than Intex Aqua Crystal smartphone. The phone looks very simple and to be honest, unattractive. The Aqua Crystal smartphone, which is priced lower than the Supreme+, looks way better. The phone is completely made up of plastic, except the front, which is glass.
The top section contains the 3.5 mm audio jack and the MicroUSB port for charging. While the bottom contains the microphone only. The loudspeaker is on the back.
The right side of the Intex Aqua Supreme+ contains the Volume Rocker and the Power button, while the left side contains SIM tray, which is a hybrid sim tray and can hold two Nano SIM cards or a Nano SIM and a MicroSD card.
The section above the display contains the earpiece, 5 Megapixel front camera, proximity sensor, and light sensor, while the bottom section of the display contains the three navigational touch sensitive keys.
Display & Hardware
Intex Aqua Supreme+ packs a 5.0" Inch IPS On-Cell HD Display with a resolution of 1280 x 720 pixels and pixel density of 223 ppi. Under the hood, the smartphone packs a MediaTek MTK6737 chipset, Quad-Core 1.3GHz Cortex-A53 processor along with 2GB RAM, ARM T720 GPU and 16GB of internal storage. You can further expand the storage of your Intex Aqua Supreme+ phone by inserting a microSD card up to 128GB.
Intex Aqua Supreme comes with an average looking display, somewhat similar to the display of Intex Aqua Crystal smartphone. Unlike Aqua Crystal display which had a cooler tint, the Aqua Supreme+ display has a bit warm tone, the viewing angles were fine and the sunlight legibility of the display was decent, the display was viewable outdoors under sunlight. I don't know why Intex opted for a 720p resolution display while other smartphone manufacturers like Xiaomi are offering a 1080p display in similar price range. Intex is offering MediaTek MTK6737 along with 2GB RAM in Aqua Supreme+ which again is disappointing, since Xiaomi Redmi Note 4 which comes in same price range, offers Qualcomm Snapdragon 625 Octa-Core processor with 4GB RAM and a Full HD display.
Performance & Connectivity
Intex Aqua Supreme+ runs on Android 6.0 Marshmallow with Indus OS 2.0 on top of it. The smartphone is loaded with tons of bloatware which keeps annoying the user by pushing unnecessary notifications. Not to forget, the bloatware installed takes a good amount of the storage and also slows the system down by running in the background. Fortunately, the bloatware can be removed by the user easily, without rooting their phone. Talking about the software, I was happy to encounter Indus OS 2.0 once again, If you can recall I did a post on Indus OS 2.0 a few months ago. Indus OS does improve the software experience a bit, its regional language & other regional features will be helpful to the rural population and to those who find smartphones complicated. Thanks to the 2GB RAM, multitasking on Supreme+ was better than Aqua Crystal smartphone but still not so great. We did run a couple of benchmarks on Intex Aqua Supreme+ to get a better idea of the hardware performance and here are the results. The AnTuTu score was; 28682 and the Geekbench 4 score for single-core was 522, while the score for multi-core was; 1386.
Intex Aqua Supreme+ supports 3G and 4G LTE networks, other connectivity options includes Bluetooth, GPS, Wi-Fi and FM radio. The network reception throughout our testing was satisfactory, no call drops or any other network related issues were experienced. The call quality was pretty good. The smartphone packs a G-sensor, ambient light sensor, and a proximity sensor.
Camera & Battery
Intex Aqua Supreme+ comes with a 13 Megapixel Rear camera with f/2.0 aperture, 1.12um pixel size, Autofocus and 720p HD video recording support with EIS setting. The camera comes with quite a lot of options like; GPS Location tagging, Scene Modes, Color Effects, White Balance, Anti-Flicker, Anti-Shake setting, Face Detection, Smile Shot, Self Timer, Face Beauty and Continous shot up to 99 shots. You also get a Dual-LED flash on the rear. Coming to the camera quality, the output is pretty average, slightly better than the Aqua Crystal smartphone, but overall disappointing. The photos clicked by the camera were mostly blurred, noisy and lacked detail with dull looking colors. The front 5 Megapixel camera comes with f/2.2 aperture and 1.12um pixel size. The front camera is similar to the front camera of Aqua Crystal smartphone, the selfies clicked were average. You get face beauty feature which enhances your selfies making them blemish free & brighter.
Intex Aqua Supreme+ comes with a 3000 mAh Li-Polymer battery, which is non-removable and does not support fast charging. It's good to see that Intex is offering a 3000 mAh battery in a smartphone at such low price. The battery lasts more than a day with moderate usage and takes about 3 hours 26 minutes to charge fully from 0% to 100%. I was really hoping for fast charging support but it wasn't present.
Verdict
If you're a regular reader of this blog, then you must have seen my review of Intex Aqua Crystal smartphone, which I published a week ago. I've been using Intex Aqua Supreme+ & Aqua Crystal smartphones since three weeks now and since then I've been using them extensively, each day. Intex Aqua Supreme+ is really a good phone but looks very cheap in terms of design, I'm surprised how Intex passed the design, in my opinion, the Aqua Crystal looks way better than Supreme and also is quite attractive, on the other hand, the Supreme+ looks ridiculous even though it's the high-end model in the Aqua series. Coming to the performance part, It seemed average to me but was not that bad, the camera, both rear and front were surely below average but battery life was great. Multitasking was good, if done between two or three apps, as you increase the number, the processor will be the bottleneck to a decent 2GB RAM. I'm happy that Intex offered Indus OS 2.0 topped on Android 6.0 Marshmallow, the OS is really good for the rural or non-techy audience.
My Rating: 3.5 Out of 5
I agree it's not the best-looking smartphone out there, but it also ain't the worst one. I'll recommend this phone to those who are looking for a phone with the Indian touch, all-around regional language support, and other features. You are willing to buy a phone with Indus OS, good battery life, decent display and Android experience at a cheap price, then you can go for it.
Also Read: Intex Aqua Crystal Review