Review: Intex Aqua Ace Raises Stakes in the Mid-Segment Market
Intex Aqua Ace offers a premium-looking 4G smartphone in budget, but falls short of impressing us.
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Key Specifications: Intex Aqua Ace 4G
- Display: 5-inch 1280x720 pixels
- Processor: Quad-core Mediatek MT6735
- RAM: 3GB
- Operating System: Android 5.1 Lollipop
- Rear Camera: 13MP
- Front Camera: 5MP
- Battery: 2,300mAh
Price: Rs. 12,999
Intex Aqua Ace, at Rs 12,999, is the Indian brand’s top-priced product. It is an attempt to break into the highly lucrative mid-segment market. But does the smartphone fit in?
What’s Good?
Picking it up right out of the box, we looked for the battery, only to find it integrated. At just 121 grams, the 5-inch phone feels unusually light, and has a very slim body, with a non-removable back panel.
The rear of the smartphone has been glazed with a layer of glass, that too with Gorilla Glass 3 protection, just like on the front screen. The overall glass construction adds to the premium look of the smartphone. Design is a really strong point of this device.
The UI of Aqua Ace has icons borrowed from Xiaomi’s MIUI 5 skin, which is overlaid on Android 5.1 (Lollipop) and has a guaranteed Android 6.0 (Marshmallow) upgrade lined-up.
Intex Aqua Ace is powered by the 1.3GHz quad-core MediaTek MT6735 processor, with a 3GB RAM. It’s enough to glide you through your daily work and play requirements. In our tests, the phone didn’t lag, the transitions were smooth, and gameplay quite rich.
The 2300mAh battery is a big winner here, as it lasts for a full day of moderate to heavy usage. We tried it with two hours of phone calls, four hours of WhatsApp and messaging, an hour of video and web surfing, and a constant internet connection.
The smartphone supports dual 4G SIMs and has an inbuilt storage capacity of 16GB, which can be upgraded to 128GB through a microSD card. Another really impressive part about this phone is its audio output, which is quite loud and encased in a bottom-facing speaker. One catch here though, only one side of the speaker holes has an actual loudspeaker.
What’s Bad?
Coming back to square one, the glass back of Aqua Ace makes it quite prone to slips, and gets a little difficult to hold. Now couple that with the slightly off-placed power button and volume rocker keys on the sides, and you end up pushing them unintentionally.
On the front, the 1280x720 display shows saturated colours, which is just 294 pixels per inch, affecting the sharpness.
The camera let us down too. The 13-megapixel rear and 5-megapixel front cameras produced grainy images that had a pastel look. The photographs deteriorated with lower lighting. The good thing is that the images had natural colours.
The review device that we got had this peculiar issue of regularly losing an active internet connection – whether WiFi or mobile data. We had to restart the device or the connection to make it work again.
Why Buy It?
If you’re looking for a premium-looking phone that decently handles your average daily requirements, you should definitely go for the Intex Aqua Ace. But, if camera and display quality gets you concerned, we advise you to look elsewhere.
Aqua Ace competes with Xiaomi’s Mi4i/Mi4 and Moto G3, which offer better display resolution, along with a better camera performance. Additionally, Moto G3 offers water resistance too. But you’ll have to buy all it’s competition from an online e-commerce portal, whereas Intex Aqua Ace is available at offline retail shops.
All in all, Intex Aqua Ace really got us excited but fell a little short of becoming the king of our hearts.
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