Panasonic has added a new budget smartphone, the Ray X, in its Eluga Series. The phone comes at an attractive price of Rs 8,999. Its USP is 3GB of RAM, 32GB of onboard storage and a 4,000mAh battery. Let’s check out in how it performs as a daily driver in our review.
Design and Build
The Panasonic Eluga Ray X is made up of metallic body. The design is similar to the Eluga Ray Max. Although there’s a slight difference in the positions of the buttons. The rear panel has the camera along with lens at the top. Panasonic and Eluga logo are also present on the metallic surface along with a speaker at the bottom. The rear panel is removable and one can find out the two micro-SIM card slots and a microSD card slot.
The front panel has a secondary camera and sensors on the top. The fingerprint sensor is mounted over the home key. There is 2.5D curved glass all of the above. The volume rocker keys and the power buttons on the right edge. The 3.5mm audio jack is at the top and the micro USB port at the bottom side of the edge.
Display
It has 5.5-inch HD IPS display with a resolution of 1,280 x 720 pixels. The display is protected by Corning Gorilla Glass. The panel is average and one can see the low pixels and colours also seem dull. The screen can be seen under direct sunlight but, the viewing angles aren’t impressive.
Hardware and Software
The Panasonic Eluga Ray X is powered by a 64-bit quad-core MediaTek processor clocked at 1.3GHz. It has 3GB of RAM and 32GB of inbuilt storage. The storage can be further expandable up to 64GB via microSD card slot. Out of 32GB user will get around 24GB of free space.
On the software end, it runs Android 6.0 Marshmallow out of the box. It has an almost stock Android interface with no extra apps. But sadly, that also means that it doesn’t provide a lot of customisation options.
Performance
It terms of the performance, the device is average. The multitasking is good, but it crashes when intensive apps are being used. The touch response is also acceptable.
The gaming experience is also average. One can easily play the smaller games but while running heavier games like Modern Combat 5, it lags a lot.
It scores 29653 in AnTuTu and 9464 in Quadrant Standard. In Nena Mark 2.4 it scores 56.7, which is less than average. While in GeekBench, it scored 559 in Single core and 1596 in Multi-Core tests.
The audio and video performance of the smartphone is also average. The 4G and VoLTE connectivity are quite good and I didn’t found any type of call drops in it. The fingerprint response is a bit slow but works accurately most of the times.
Battery
It has a massive 4,000mAh battery which gives full day backup with moderate usage. With minimal use, once can get about two day of battery backup with it. The battery section is really a plus point for the smartphone.
Camera
It sports a 13-megapixel rear camera with LED flash. The performance of the camera is good to some extent when the light is good. One can take good photos in daylight only, but otherwise, the details are very less and focusing takes time.
The front camera is of 5-megapixel which shoots acceptable selfies. The additional face beauty mode works fine and enhances the selfies. However, I found out that the whole camera works very slow, whether it is capturing objects or while changing the settings in it.
Arbo
Arbo is the AI-based personal Assistant provided in this smartphone, which helps the user in many ways like suggesting relevant prompts and apps as per their needs and habits. I’ll elaborate the various features of the Arbo in a separate post, so stay tuned for that.
Gizmo-Verdict
The Panasonic Eluga Ray X is a good smartphone in terms of the battery backup and build quality. At the cost of Rs 8,999, it has decent features, but performance and camera quality is average. At this price, you can go for some powerful options such as the Coolpad Note 5 Lite or the Xiaomi Redmi 3S Prime, but if you want a phablet with good battery life, then you can surely go for it.
