The Aqua Ring sports an interesting design!
The new Intex Aqua Ring is a budget smartphone with decent specification and design. Indian manufacturers like Intex, Micromax etc. are more focused in this segment as the customer demands are higher in it. Additionally, a majority of people still prefer such options and buy from offline retail stores.
The key highlight of the Intex Aqua Ring is the ring-shaped camera design at the back, 1GB of RAM and HD display. Let’s check out whether it is a good option to buy or not.
Design
The Intex Aqua Ring comes with a furnished plastic body, the half portion is classy and shiny, while the other half is dull and slippery. This might be because of the texture of back panel. The ring at the back is made up of concentric rings and the reflection coming out of them gives the phone an amazing look. The same pattern is also available at the lower front panel.
The back panel has camera and lens in the ring-shaped design, Intex logo at the lower portion along with a small speaker. The rear panel is removable and it exposes one full SIM-card slot, one micro-SIM slot, and a microSD card slot. There’s a 2,470mAh of a removable battery as well.
The front panel has the camera at the top along with the sensors. There are no capacitive buttons, and instead, the company has given on-screen buttons. The bezel is very thick and consumes most part of the screen. The power key and the volume rocker keys are at the right edge, along with a 3.5mm audio jack and a microUSB port.
Overall the design is simple and elegant, and the addition of ring ensures that the Aqua Ring gets a thumbs up from my side. However, the rear part could have made better. Â With a size of 143.5mm x 72mm x 9.25mm, it fits perfectly in hand but a bit bulky with 159gm weight.
Display
The Intex Aqua Ring features a 5-inch HD IPS display, which offers 16.7M display colour reproduction and a resolution of 1,280 x 720 pixels. It has 66.6 percent screen-to-body ratio and the display is protected by the DragonTrail Glass.
The display of the smartphone is impressive as it offers good and vibrant colours. The screen can be visible under the direct sunlight as well as in different viewing angles. In this budget range, the smartphone has one of the best displays.
Specifications and performance
The smartphone is powered by Quad-core MediaTek MTK6580A clocked at 1.3GHz with Mali-400MP GPU and 1GB of DDR3 RAM. Out of 1GB user only get around 250MB of free RAM to use. There is 8GB of onboard storage given to the users out of which 4.78GB of free space are available. Users can also expand the storage via microSD card slot. In terms of hardware, the smartphone has good specs and worthy to get in the Rs 5k range.
 
 
The Intex Aqua Ring comes with Android Marshmallow 6.0 out of the box, with a vanilla interface as there’s no custom skin. However, there are lots of bloatware installed in it like Fun Club, T-20 Cricket Game, AskMe Bazaar, Intex Service, Mobikwik and many more. This might also be the reason that the available free space is very low. The customization settings are also minimal, and there no additional changes that can be done. I didn’t find any type of lag in scrolling, switching apps and running normal apps. So the software is also good to use as far as my usage is concerned.
Talking about the gaming and benchmark performance, normal games runs perfectly, however high-end games like Asphalt 8 and Dead Trigger 2 lag a lot. That said, with the given specifications, it performs just fine in the gaming section. The AnTuTu and Quadrant Standard benchmark score are 23,856 and 7,876 which is quite low in this range.
Battery and Connectivity
The Intex Aqua Ring is packed with 2,470mAh of battery, it gives me a whole day battery life with minimal use and around 11 hours of battery with moderate use. So, in terms of battery the phone has a good strength in it.
It’s a dual-SIM smartphone with support for 3G in the primary SIM. However, its major drawback is the lack of 4G connectivity, considering all the smartphones coming out these days support it. As far as call quality is concerned, I didn’t face any type of distortion and call drop in it.
Camera
The Intex Aqua Ring has a 5-megapixel autofocus rear camera and a 5MP selfie camera. It has M512D-400 Lens with f/2.0 aperture. As per the camera specification, it shoots acceptable images. The captured images contain a lot of noise in it. The camera is also slow in focusing and thus takes some time to shoot. Colour reproduction in good and images are vibrant. The low-light performance of the camera is weak and images has a lot of noise.
 
The front camera performance is also good. In fact, it seems to capture better images than the rear one. Selfies captured have a good amount of detail and colour contrast. The given inbuilt camera app is simple and easy to use. However, it lacks customization modes in it. Overall, the camera performance is decent, but could have been better.
 
 
Verdict
Intex Aqua Ring is one of the best phones to purchase in the budget with its price of Rs 4,999. This is not the best smartphone under Rs 5,000, but the design and its performance make it a worthy buy.
Pros
- Unique Design
- Amazing performance
- HD Display
- Good battery
Cons
- Average Camera
- Bulky
- Bloatware
