Mobiistar, an all-new brand is here with its new smartphone Mobiistar XQ Dual at a starting price of Rs 7999 only. The USP of the smartphone is the Dual Camera on the front for great images. The journey of Mobiistar stars earlier this week in India with the same. Let’s see what other things the smartphone is offering to us in our review.
Design and Built:
Mobiistar XQ Dual comes with a metallic unibody supported by curved edges. the design is minimal and smooth. The rear panel has a camera at the top along with LED flash, placed on the top antenna lines. The fingerprint sensor is placed at the centre along with Mobiistar logo. On the front, the Dual Camera is placed at the top along with the other sensors.
The bezels are not very slim and take up a lot of space. Also, they’ve gone with backlit keys just below the display panel. The 3.5mm audio jack is placed at the top and the micro USB port is placed at the bottom side of the edge. The SIM card tray and the power button are placed on the right side of the edge while the volume rocker keys are at the left side of the edge.
The metallic body along with the 3000mAh of the battery makes it heavy to use. Overall the design is not that impressive but good enough for the given price. Although the rigid and sturdy body compensates the simple design factor.
Display:
Mobiistar XQ Dual features a 5.5 in Full HD IPS display with a pixel resolution of 1920 by 1080. It is supported by Asahi Dragon Trail toughness glass protection. The display of the smartphone is good but could be better. It offers bright colours but lacks the crispness. The viewing angles of the device are good but the sunlight readability needs improvement. We need to increase the brightness manually most of the times.
Specifications:
Mobiistar XQ Dual is powered by an Octa-Core Qualcomm Snapdragon 430 chipset clocked at 1.4GHz. It has 3GB of RAM and 32GB of inbuilt storage which can be further expandable up to 128Gb via microSD slot. the smartphone comes with Hybrid SIM card slots (2 Micro SIM or 1 Micro SIM + 1 microSD card). It supports 4G VoLTE on the first SIM while the other is fixed up to 3G only. Other connectivity options are Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 4.2, GPS and USB OTG.
The smartphone runs on Android 7.1 Nougat with its custom UI v3.0 out of the box. The UI is very simple and minimal. It offers very few customizations and has bloatware like Flipkart, Freezer, and SOS. The icons pack are cool and it can be changed via the themes available in the app.
Performance:
Mobiistar XQ Dual offers good usage and handling experience. The SoC paired with the 3GB of RAM is good but we found bit glitches like slow touch response and lag in the opening of apps. The multitasking ability is also average.
The gaming section of the smartphone needs improvement. The smaller games like Candy Crush and Subway Surfers runs smoothly but the high-end games need time to load. The gameplay also has a bit of lag in the graphics.
The benchmark section of the device is not that impressive. We found the scores to be low and poor comparing to the smartphone in the similar range. It scores 57009 which is good but not impressive. The Geekbench score was 653 in Single-Core and 2489 in Multi-Core.
The fingerprint sensor works fine and offers good security options. The Audio and Video quality of the smartphone is average as the video display could be a bit better. The 4G LTE connectivity is great and we didn’t find any type of lag or distortions in our usage.
Camera:
The Mobiistar XQ Dual sports a 13MP camera with f/2.0 aperture at the rear panel. The rear camera captures good images in daylight. The captured images have vibrant colours but it lacks the in-depth details which should be there. The low light camera performance is average.
On the front, we have a Dual camera setup of a 13MP primary camera with f/2.0 aperture along with a secondary 8-megapixel camera with 120-degree wide-angle lens and f/2.2 aperture. The camera is accompanied by a soft LED flash on the front. The setup captures great selfies with good colour tone.
The camera app is easy to access and offers minimal customizations. We felt there should be more modes and features to take better images. There are only a few modes like GDR, Night and Pro. Overall the front camera is impressive but the rear camera could be better
Battery:
Mobiistar XQ Dual has 3000mAh of the battery which offers 12 hours of battery life with moderate usage. The minimal users will surely get a full day backup with it. The battery capacity could be a bit more as the 4G usage has been increased exponentially. The 3000mAh of battery has no quick charge support and it takes 3+ hours to fully charge.
Gizmo Verdict:
The Mobiistar XQ Dual offers decent specifications and performance in this budget segment. The Dual Camera at the front may be an attractive point for the selfie lovers. The competition in this segment is very tough as the big brands like Xiaomi, Oppo, Lenovo, Honor all are focused on this. At the price point of Rs 7,999 there are better options available in the market but if you’re just focused on selfie camera you can go for it.
