The Xolo Play was purchased by me from a mobile store after careful consideration of online prices. I have used this phone for around two weeks now and had purchased it simply because of the nVidia Tegra 3 chipset under the hood coupled with the attractive price. After moderate, constant and heavy usage on separate intervals I have come up with the following in-depth review of this handset:
[NOTE: Antutu Benchmark score of XOLO PLAY out of the box came up to be around 8, 500 approximately instead of the 12, 500 approximate region being publicized by many reviews on YouTube and elsewhere. This has been confirmed by other users over public android Forums. ]
BUILD - The moment you take the phone out of the box you realize that the build quality is GOOD. It doesn’t feel cheap but feels solid in your hands and to an extent is quite cool to look at with its dark shining silver rims and no company logo in the front along with backlit capacitive buttons. The matte rubberized back plate gives a good grip over the phone and the Xolo and nVidia logos on the back coupled with the build quality does give it a premium feel.
The phone is pretty heavy though at around 167 grams. The charger on the other hand looks and feels way too cheap. It’s a standard wall outlet usb charger (usb wire included in the package). A free screen guard is also included in the box.
SCREEN - You switch on the phone and the opening animation doesn’t look cheap either what with all the other Chinese phones and their logos at pathetic frame rates. The opening animation is stylish and that is when I noticed the black of the display, it was rendered amazingly! (that is one of the signs of a good screen by the way, darker the blacks better it is) When android came to, the screen was breathtaking.
It is just big and beautiful. Sharpness, colour reproduction, contrast, brightness, everything was perfect and then some. I was blown away! At this price segment getting a screen like this is really something, and an OGS screen that too.
SOUND -The sound on the phone is clean, crisp and LOUD. Ringtones can be heard from far away and music plays well, it is also great with gaming with clear sound reproduction! Now things start to get shaky.
RECEPTION - Reception is good, call clarity is above average -nothing exceptional. Now although it has happened only once I do think it is worth mentioning - once I tried making a call but it wouldn’t go through even though signal strength was strong.
I restarted the phone and then calls started going through. Then I got a message from Airtel that I had a received missed calls - which only happens when someone calls you when your phone is switched off. On calling back, the callers said that my phone was switched off. On a full signal, callers could not get to me.
UI - The user interface lags quite a lot specially in the settings. The home page and apps page are fairly smooth. Website scrolling is NOT smooth. Even Gionee phones with next to nothing specs are butter smooth. Don’t expect buttery smooth UI experience.
VIDEO - Video playback is awesome! The screen comes into effect and it just blows you away, especially when it comes to hd videos. Brilliant display.
CAMERA- I found the 8 megapixel rear camera to be quite decent really contrary to many reviews on the internet. It takes great pictures during daylight, however, night pictures are obviously not all that great but they are not bad either. If you simply increase the aperture in the camera settings, night pictures become way better but noise does set in.
Daytime video recording is great and it records and plays back smoothly however, the moment it is not that bright outside or is around evening or night, recording framerates drop and the videos become laggish starting to look like videos being taken by your old Nokia handset, only a bit better. The front camera is decent, however, it reproduces darker images compared to the rear camera. Both cameras can be used to record videos in 480p, HD and full HD.
GAMING - Gaming on this phone is good. Do note I did not use the word amazing or awesome or exceptional or mind blowing. Those words are reserved for top notch phones such as the Galaxy S4 or HTC One. If you expect this phone to play all of your games in buttery smoothness specially when it boasts the Tegra 3 configurations of 4+1 cores CPU and a 12 core GPU, forget it.
Don’t get me wrong, high end games like Asphalt 4 and Real Boxing are unbelievable on this phone, few other games like NFS Most Wanted play in the maximum detail but there is a very noticeable drop in framerates. Batman dark knight rises is unplayable on this phone, the framerates are horrible. Games like Temple Run and Subway surfer work flawlessly. The phone does heat up a lot around the camera region while gaming or when using it as a 3G hotspot.
List of games I have personally tried and tested on Xolo Play reagarding their playability is as follows:
1.Temple Run - smooth as butter
Temple Run 2 - smooth as butter
Temple Run Brave - smooth
Temple Run Oz with HD content at HIGH graphics setting - slight lag (excellent graphics)
Subway Surfer - Smooth as butter
Vector - smooth as butter
Paper Toss - smooth as butter
Falling Fred - slight lag
Skiing fred - medium lag
Beach Buggy (specially made for Tegra) - medium lag (excellent graphics)
Riptide GP2(specially made for Tegra) - medium lag (excellent graphics)
Asphalt 7 - smooth as butter (excellent graphics)
NFS Most Wanted (set to maximum graphics by default) - lags (excellent graphics) at times it lags a LOT.
Into the dead - smooth as butter
Dead Space - smooth as butter
Batman Dark Knight Rises - unplayable framerates. Audio goes ahead of graphics.
Amazing Spiderman - unplayable framerates.
Real Boxing (specially made for Tegra 3) - WoW!!! which means smooth as butter and GODLIKE graphics.
and now...
BATTERY LIFE - Aaah battery life. The million dollar question (You would expect gaming to be the million dollar question but trust me it’s not). Drumroll please...and it is BAD. Moderate usage of social media apps and internet, keeping 3g usage and screen brightness at minimum along with with a powerful battery saver app (deep sleep battery saver pro) and NO gaming, this phone gives me 10 hours battery life maximum (with 2g it will last more).
Out of the box it gave me 7 hours after a full charge. I realized the problem with this phone was that it drains battery even when not in use! That is when the battery saver app came in and saved me a bit. If you are gaming? Battery will last an hour and a half maximum depending on how cpu consuming it is - hour and a half being the least cpu consuming. If you are thinking of gaming without a charger forget it because even with the phone on charge it tends to lose battery while gaming high end cpu consuming games or stays the same for lower end games. Also the battery behaviour is extremely arbitrary.
Once it jumped from 99% battery life to 83% in front of my eyes and stayed at 83% for almost an hour and then once it jumped from 5% battery life to 15%!!
Now you must be thinking why am I still writing? All the aspects of the phone have been taken care of! Not quite, as mentioned earlier, this IS an in-depth review so I will mention some problems that I have faced personally with this phone over a usage of more than one week some of which have been confirmed by other users on public android forums:
1. Right out the box the earphones did not work with the phone (maybe that is why Flipkart has bundled a free Samsung bluetooth earpiece with this phone now). After I plugged it in and played a song I couldn’t hear anything.
I increased the volume to maximum and checked if I had connected it properly- everything was fine. That’s when I heard an almost inaudible echo like sound from my right earphone. It was music. I used the xolo earphones on my Ipad and they worked. I used normal earphones on Xolo play and it was working. So earphones provided by Xolo for Xolo Play do not work with Xolo Play.
2. While listening to music on my Skullcandy earphones for a while all of a sudden the phone stops playing bass and plays music only in treble. Disconnecting and reconnecting the wires brought it back to normalcy but then in another 15 minutes it happened again. It happened with both Google Music and Poweramp Pro and continues to happen till this date.
3. The screen at times refuses to switch on (also known as SOD - ’Sleep of Death’ in the Android world)! And this has happened with me on more than three occasions. Music keeps playing, the capacitive buttons were lighting up and responding to touch but the screen just would not switch on! I had to open the phone, remove the battery and re-install it to boot the phone to make it work. This does not happen frequently though but when it does it is quite bugging, specially when you are outside.
4. Wifi seems to disconnect itself as per its convenience and then connects back again in the same manner after usage of around 30 minutes or so. For some reason continuous usage is something this phone does not understand.
5. For the android enthusiast, development for this phone is underway by a handful of developers, it is slow though as Xolo has not replied to any of the developers requests to reveal their kernel source which they are supposed to do by law. All major companies like Htc and Samsung have done it, don’t see why Xolo of all companies doesn’t.
Even their support staff are inexperienced and don’t reply to mails (I have experienced this myself) and don’t know more than half of the technical things being asked of them. 6. While using social media, for example facebook, whatsapp, tumblr etc., really long messages simply disappear. They show up for a second and then disappear. Nothing helps. If you can’t see it, you can’t see. This applies only for exceptionally long posts such as a page long. Otherwise it works just fine.
You will notice that EVERYTHING wrong with this phone is software related. Games tend to not perform as well as expected because Xolo has programmed the Tegra 3 processor to underclock its speed once the phone overheats and it heats up a lot and really soon too, so the 1.5ghz speed that Xolo boasts of is seldom experienced by the user which is why games don’t perform as well because Tegra 3 is not performing at full potential.
Also the phone comes with JellyBean 4.1.1 which is pretty outdated considering even the newest of companies with Android phones are rolling out with 4.2 with a super smooth UI!! Hell, 4.3 just got released and Key Lime Pie is around the corner! HTC One X has Tegra 3 and it is a year and a half older but it runs brilliantly with a smooth UI, how come Xolo did such a bad job?
Despite all of these problems, weirdly, I enjoy the phone, but then that’s me. Simply because it is a phone made for gamers, has a solid premium build, great sound and has an awesome screen, has nVidia Tegra 3 and most importantly crams in all of these features for a very affordable price tag. What else could a gamer want right? The phones potential is yet to be tapped into and hopefully Xolo will take these things into consideration and come out with an update for the phone sooner than later.
Till Xolo comes up with an update that addresses these issues, unless you are a casual mobile user, harcore gamer or have a charging outlet around most of the time, I suggest you wait with your hard earned cash. Oh, one more thing- the phone’s design is a complete rip off of a Chinese branded phone called Beidou Little Pepper Q1. Do NOTE- only design has been copied and not materials used or features provided. The Pepper Q1 weighs in around 120 gms whereas the Xolo Play weighs in at 167 gms with features that the Pepper Q1 does not have such as an OGS display, better materials used, sensors and a better battery.
Do RATE my review. :)