In partnership with LeEco, Coolpad recently launched the Cool 1 at an attractive price of Rs 13,999. Some of the exciting features of the smartphone are dual cameras at the back, 4GB of RAM and Snapdragon 652 chipset. Let’s check out the smartphone and see if it can withstand the competition in the sub-Rs 15K range.
Design and build
The body is somehow similar to the LeEco Le 2 apart from the dual camera. It has a full metallic body and 2.5D curved glass at front panel. The backplate is smooth, and while its size is good enough to slip into the pocket, it’s also slightly slippery to slip out of the hand. The chamfered edges give it a premium finish and attractive look.
It offers capacitive touch buttons on the front panel and a fingerprint scanner at the back side, below the dual rear camera. The volume keys and the power button is on the right edge. The 3.5 mm audio jack is on the top while the USB Type-C port is on the bottom along with speakers.
Display
The Coolpad Cool 1 feature a 5.5 inch full HD IPS LCD display with FHD resolution. The display quality is impressive. It has a good amount of colour and contrast. The screen can be seen under direct sunlight and in different viewing angles.
Hardware and Software
The smartphone is powered by a 64-bit octa-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 652 SOC (Cortex A72 4 x 1.8 GHz + Cortex A53 4 x 1.2 GHz ). It has 4GB of DDR3 RAM and Adreno 510 GPU for graphics. There is 32GB of internal storage, but no expandable micro SD card slot. Out of 32GB storage, 29.12Gb is free for use.
The Coolpad Cool 1 runs Android 6.0 Marshmallow with LeEco’s custom EMUI 5.8 skin on the top of it. The UI is clean but has few additional apps like Xplore keyboard, Amazon shopping and Remote control. Out of 4 GB RAM, the user usually gets around 2.5GB of free RAM.
Performance
The smartphone has excellent touch response. It multitasks easily and handles the apps smoothly as well. I was able to run several apps and games simultaneously and it handled them smoothly. It was easy to swipe between them with zero lag.
The benchmark performance of smartphone is impressive. It scores 75028 in AnTuTu and 1485 (single core) while 3211 (multi-core) in Geekbench. The scores are pretty good with respect to the others.
The gaming performance of the smartphone is also very good. I played high-end games like Dead Trigger 2 and Modern Combat 4 smoothly. There is a minimal heating issue while playing the high-end games.
Talking about the connectivity, it works great. There was no networking issue or any type of call drop in it. The video and audio quality is good but not the best, while playing sound output to maximum, the sound quality gets distorted.
Battery
It comes with 4,000 mAh battery, which offers an impressive runtime. I got around 10 hours of run time with moderate usage. It gives around two days of standby time which is quite good. The average users might even get more than two days of battery life.
Camera
The rear panel has a pair of a 13-megapixel camera with f/2.0 aperture, PDAF and dual tone LED flash. It shoots really impressive images. The captured images have good depth and details. There are several modes given in the camera app but Bokeh effect and Night Life modes are the best. The low light performance is not good as it contains a bit of noise, but it’s not too bad.
The front camera is 8 MP and has a f/2.2 aperture. It captures good selfies, the images are bright and good colour contrast with softness.
Gizmo-Verdict
Its price tag of Rs 13,999 makes it one of the best smartphones under Rs 15k segment. It offers great performance, excellent touch capabilities and battery life. The camera quality is also very good. So overall it is a good smartphone to buy. Additionally, the device was recently launched with 3GB RAM variant priced at just Rs 10,999, making an even more attractive proposition. That said, the device does face competition from phones like the Xiaomi Redmi Note 4 or Honor 6X.
