Saurabh Singh1 | Follow @singh_saurabh102 | New Delhi, October 12, 2015 | UPDATED 21:04 IST
The mainstream smartphone market is buzzing with activity off late. Companies like Motorola, Lenovo, Xiaomi, Honor et al have some pretty amazing phones in this range that aspire to achieve one goal — offering consumers best value for money. In the run-up to building a bang for your buck smartphone, corners are often cut, which is not surprising. More often than not, it’s the design and build quality that goes for a toss. What is the first thing that comes to your mind, when you try to describe a phone that costs something around Rs.12000? Quite possibly, you’ll say, hey, it must be made of plastic. There’s a general perception that phones that cost around Rs.10,000 cannot be fancy. Of course Motorola, Lenovo and others are trying to change that perception. But, at the end of the day, all their phones in this range are still made of plastic.
Enter InFocus. The US-based company has already released a handful of phones, in the relatively short time that it has been in India. Its phones may not end up rewriting history, at least for now; but, you can’t help but notice the pattern in its every phone launch. The M808 — its latest budget phone — is out to change general perception that budget phones can’t look sexy and premium. But, can it sustain on looks alone? We find out.
Design & build quality
The InFocus M808 is the first smartphone in its price range to boast of a full-metal unibody design. That’s right. It’s not metal restricted to the sides, or buttons. It is metal throughout. The M808, in a word, is gorgeous. It may not necessarily have the most original designs in the world — in fact it borrows a little something from everybody in the trade — but then originality is overrated in the world of smartphones. After all, everyone’s copying everyone. The anodised aluminium body of the M808 looks and feels premium in the true sense, a first for a phone in its price bracket. On the face of it it’s a regular bar of cold solid metal, gently curving along the edges. The all-metal body — although slippery — feels good to hold.
Surprisingly, InFocus has managed the dimensions well on this one. Even though it is made of metal, the M808 is as thick and weighs as much as the Lenovo K3 Note. It’s as thick as the Xiaomi Mi 4i which is another slim phone. So, even though it is slippery, the M808 won’t be flying out of your hands, all thanks to its ergonomic dimensions. On the top of the back cover, InFocus has painted a black strip on to the phone. The camera is placed on this strip. Our review unit came in Gold with black strip and the combination is an instant eye catcher.
The left edge houses the power button and volume rocker. The buttons are firm and give good tactile feedback. The right edge has the dualSIM (nanoSIM) and microSD card slots. All in all, the M808 is a well put together device. It’s tightly sealed in from every corner — the speaker vent and microUSB slot are the only openings — that makes you wonder why the M808 doesn’t have any IP68 certification. Yes, this is not a water and dust resistant phone like the Moto G (Gen 3). Also, it is missing out on any additional protective covering on the front.
Display
The M808 comes with a 5.2-inch FullHD IPS display with a 1920×1080 pixels resolution and 424ppi pixel density. It is among the select few phones in its price range to come with a FullHD display, something which instantly puts it in the ‘desirable’ league. But, specifications tell only half the story. Is the display on-board the M808 any good? Yes, it is. The M808 offers a good mix of brightness and colour saturation. It is undoubtedly among the best displays in this price range right now. It betters the Lenovo K3 Note in peak brightness (as well as colour reproduction) and falls only slightly short of the Xiaomi Mi 4i. The phone gives you an option to tinker with the colour temperature, but we were pretty satisfied with its default ‘natural’ setting. The M808 offers excellent viewing angles. Moreover, the phone offers a good output in outdoor environment and maintains decent viewing angles as well, so that reading text and watching videos is not a strain. The screen is also not prone to attracting fingerprints and smudges, which helps improve sunlight legibility.
Software
The M808 runs Android 5.1 Lollipop-based InLife UI. The skinning is on the heavier side here. If you’re looking for a close to stock Android experience, this is not the phone for you. You’re better off with the Moto G (Gen 3). If you don’t mind Android with a ‘fancy’ paint job, you wouldn’t mind the InLife UI. Good thing is, although it is fancy, it doesn’t feel like it’s going overboard with anything. In particular, you don’t have to worry about animations flying all over the place. The scheme is pretty straight forward — like the iOS (and a number of Chinese UIs that copy it) where everything is arranged in multiple home screens. You can practically have as many home screens as you want. There is no app drawer. The pull-down notification panel has been re-tuned a bit, but still carries Lollipop’s signature one finger swipe down for quick settings (and notifications) and a two finger swipe down for more options. Icons have been made bolder, so they kind of pop out instantly unlike stock Android which offers lighter tones.
The app switcher has also been fine-tuned a bit to include a task manager and kill-all feature to the otherwise traditional card-based view for opened apps. The task manager is useful to have as it gives you instant access to all your opened apps (even system apps that are otherwise not shown in the app switcher) along with the memory (RAM) they are eating up at that moment. In this way you can instantly free up space hogged by unnecessary apps. While we were pretty satisfied with the InLife UI — for the most part — we did not like the amount of bloat or unwanted apps inside the M808. There’s lots and lots of it, something that could have been avoided. Also, this is not the UI — and phone — for someone who likes to have many customisation options, something that YU’s Cyanogen and to an extent Xiaomi’s MIUI give you.
Performance
The M808 is powered by a 1.3 GHz octa-core MediaTek MT6753 processor coupled with Mali-T720MP2 GPU and 2GB RAM. For a phone that costs Rs.12999 these are pretty standard specs, nothing out of the ordinary but you can’t say it’s under-powered. Heck the Moto G (Gen 3) works just fine even with a Qualcomm Snapdragon 410 processor. The M808 handles your basic everyday tasks with ease. The MT6753 processor aided by 2GB RAM ensures that the phone won’t leave you asking for more. In fact, performance is at par with devices rocking a Qualcomm Snapdragon 615 chip, which is a popular — and very common — mid range processor.
But, there’s a downside. Although, it does the basics thrown at it pretty well, the M808 is prone to heating. Now, heating is quite common in majority of smartphones these days. In fact, it is one of the key drawbacks of the M 4i. Unfortunately, the same is applicable for the M808 as well. While basic tasks are handled well, the phone starts showing signs of distress the moment more than 5-6 apps are opened simultaneously. You will be able to run as many as 10-15 apps together, but heating issues may force you into killing them. Moreover, the phone also force kills apps that are causing it to overheat, so be prepared for random app crashes every now and then. The phone handles GPU-intensive tasks with slight hiccups, which means graphics is not something the M808 particularly excels at. While you will be able to play basic games like Candy Crush Saga quite effortlessly, there will be moments of lag, particularly when many apps are opened in the background. We did not however encounter a game crashing due to overheating in our usage. GPU-intensive games like Asphalt 8: Airborne run alright at low graphics setting.
The M808 comes with 16GB of internal storage of which 10.40GB is available for use. The device supports expandable storage of up to 128GB via micro-SD card. The speaker vent on the M08 is located at the lower edge. The M808 offers decent audio output, if not the best. Peak volume however is only satisfactory, as sound tends to cracks at max volume. Phone calls made with the InFocus M808 are of acceptable quality and we did not encounter any odd call drops on our review unit. Both the microphone and earpiece sound quality are good. The phone supports 4G LTE (1800/2300 MHz bands) on both SIMs.
Camera
The M808 sports a 13-megapixel camera on the rear with autofocus and LED flash, along with a 5-megapixel camera on the front. While Android phones — at this price — struggled in camera department earlier, this is not the case anymore. The Xiaomi Mi 4i and the Moto G (Gen 3) have good cameras, so you can’t really say that a good Android camera phone has to be expensive, not anymore. Unfortunately, the M808 has a mediocre camera, which clicks passable photos in outdoor well-lit situations. Now, most of the camera phones out there manage this sort of performance. And so does the M808, which frankly speaking isn’t a rear feat. Photos clicked in outdoor environment pack in enough detail but there are metering issues. There’s a genuine lack in brightness, so that images come out dull and less appealing. The camera struggles in scenes with uneven light where in a bid to capture more detail it ends up blowing up the highlights. Also, metering issues persist. It’s not very quick to focus — in fact it’s slow — but shutter speed is fairly decent.
Images clicked indoors are downright disappointing. While there are metering issues, noise is pretty evident even when the background is well lit. Also, the phone has trouble focusing moving objects, even though it comes with a dedicated Motion Tracking mode. Selfies clicked with the front cam are downright disappointing. There is loss of detail even in well lit situations, and noise is aplenty.
To sum it up, the camera may be the weakest link of the InFocus M808. The rear cam can shoot FullHD videos (1080p) at 30fps. Again, focus is way off in these videos and noise is quite abundant, so it’s nothing really special to talk about. Check the following image samples to get an idea of the InFocus M808 Camera performance: Sample 1 , Sample 2 , Sample 3 , Sample 4 , Sample 5 , Sample 6 , Sample 7 , Sample 8 , Sample 9 , Sample 10 .
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Battery
The M808 uses a 2,450mAh battery which is non-removable. Battery life is average at best. Phones like the K3 Note and Moto G (Gen 3) have shown that it is possible to have a respectable battery life in this price range. The M808 has a smaller battery as compared to either of them.
We subjected the device to two hours of 1080p video playback, one hour of YouTube video playback, half an hour of basic gaming, phone calls to the tune of half an hour over 4G and some web browsing. We also clicked some photos with the device. This gave us close to 7 hours of battery life on the device, which is disappointing. A more generalised usage should see you sail through 12-13 hours — which obviously isn’t a full working day — which again isn’t promising.
Should you buy it?
The InFocus M808 is a gorgeous phone. It is undoubtedly very good looking. It is a little slippery, but we can live with that. At the same time, it has a fantastic display with good viewing angles. Moving on, performance is decent, but heating issues often take the better of it. Let’s sum up the negatives now. The M808 has a mediocre camera when rivals offer so much better. The battery life is downright disappointing on the M808, again rivals are offering much more.
Get some idea? Well, this is a phone where style is everything. The same however cannot be said about the substance underneath. The Lenovo K3 Note – although made of plastic – is a far better value for money. At the same time, the Moto G (Gen 3) is a very well-rounded phone at this price. In such a case, it’s better you stay clear off the InFocus M808.
Also Read: Full review of Motorola Moto G (Gen 3)13
Also Read: Full review of Lenovo K3 Note14
DESIGN7/10 DISPLAY7/10 CAMERA6/10 SOFTWARE6.5/10 PERFORMANCE6.5/10 BATTERY6/10 CONNECTIVITY7/10 VALUE6/10
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