At first look, the iBall mSLR Cobalt 4 seems to be an attempt of Best IT World to differentiate itself and get noticed in the highly crowded affordable smartphone segment in the country.
At first look, the iBall mSLR Cobalt 4, seems to be an attempt of iBall to differentiate itself and get noticed in the highly crowded affordable smartphone segment in the country. But the question is, has it been able to achieve it? Priced at 8,499, the device comes with a novel concept of four detachable lenses: a zoom lens with 8x zoom, a fish-eye lens with a 175-180 degree viewing angle, a wide-angle lens with a 130-degree viewing angle and a macro lens with 10x magnification on object distance of 10 to 15mm. To give users control over what exactly they capture, company has provided a clip for the smaller lenses and a customised back cover with a camera ring to attach the lenses.
There has always been a demand for better and high resolution camera in smartphone and company official reckon that mSLR Cobalt 4 is aimed at taking quality pictures and will “change the way photographs are captured on the smartphones.” However, for the past few weeks, I have been using the device, the in-built camera capabilities have been fairly decent, but using additional lenses, especially 8x zoom, have been difficult and challenging. When clipped over the inbuilt 8-megapixel rear shooter, it is difficult to control, outcomes are shaky, and inbuilt flash interferes with mounted lenses, ultimately defeating the entire purpose of using mSLR, for being creative and ability to play with focus, aperture, depth of field etc.
If you set aside the additional lenses, the mSLR Cobalt 4 is a decent phone. It looks and feels great in the hand. It does not have the curved edges but the outer display and design are appealing. On the front, it has a large 5-inch IPS qHD display that offers 960 x 540 pixels resolution with 220 ppi pixel density, allowing a user to enjoy both videos and games with decent quality, and smoothly access emails and files. iBall has placed both volume rocker and lock buttons on the right side of the phone with left being completely free of any distractions. An earphone jack and the micro-USB charging port are up on the top, while a physical home button with two capacitive keys lie below the screen. The back houses the loudspeaker grills.
Probing the innards, the phone runs on Android 4.4 KitKat OS and it is powered by octa core 1.4Ghz cortex A7 advanced processor with 1 GB RAM. Phone is able to handle games, camera functions, videos and multitasking seamlessly. When it comes to internal memory, although company has mentioned 8GB internal memory but only about 3.94GB is available for users, as approximately 4GB are being used by the system for internal storage and OS . User can expand it up to 32 GB with a microSD card.
On the software front, essential options such as call, message and camera are easily accessible with a single swipe in their direction from the middle of the screen. The phone comes with the pre-installed essential Apps. It has HotKnot feature, a MediaTek file transfer mechanism technology, which utilises the physics of a capacitive touch screen to transfer the data from phone to phone, when they are in close proximity of less than 1 centimeter. Company claims to support 15 Indian regional languages for reading and writing, however in the language setting option, it offers only two languages – English and Hindi.
On the connectivity side, mSLR cobalt 4 has all major connectivity features such as dual-sim, Bluetooth, GPS, Wi-Fi, 3G and USB. The phone is backed by a 2000mAh removal battery. The performance of the battery has been satisfactory during the evaluation period.
In addition to major attraction of extra lenses, mSLR Cobalt 4 comes with an enhanced 8-megapixel auto-focus rear camera with LED flash and 3-megapixel front camera with soft flash. Some of the picture, I took indoor and outdoor, the camera was able to capture the fine details. Overall, it captures fairly sharp and clear photo, and offer quality playback and recording of video.
During the two weeks that I spent with this phone, I found the design, interface and display quality to be interesting and appealing. But given the fact, the handling of additional lenses are so difficult that it aerify the basic purpose of bringing SLR features to a smartphone. Also, at this price tag of 8499, the mSLR Cobalt 4 seems to be little over priced compared to its nearest rivals such as Micromax’s Yu Yuphoria, Redmi 2, Lenovo A7000, and Yureka. All have more to offer in terms of internal storage, camera-pixels, battery power and display quality.
It is true that the source of the most uploaded images on social media is not a DSLR or a point or shoot camera , but the phone camera. iBall’s mSLR experiment could have been a success, had it focused on quality of lenses and camera performance.
SPECIFICATIONS
Display: 5 inch IPS qHD display ( 960 x 540 pixels, ~220 ppi)
Processor: 1.4 Ghz Octa core Cortex A7 CPU
Operating system: Android 4.4 Kitkat
Memory & storage: 1 GB RAM + 8 GB internal storage
Camera: 8 MP rear camera with LED Flash & 3.2 MP front camera, 8x Telephoto Lens, Fisheye Lens, Macro Lens, Wide Angle Lens
SIM type: Dual SIM
Battery: 2000mAh, replaceable
Estimated street price: Rs 8499
