Look and design
The design of Intex Aqua Ace is very similar to Sony’s product, with a little bit of Apple’s look added to it. Metallic rim has been used on the edges of the phone. When you hold the handset for the first time, you feel that it is light. Its entire body is made of plastic. However, this handset does not give the feeling of being complete.
The white and gold variant we got for review looks decent, but is definitely not an attention-grabber.
The micro-USB port is placed on the top. Next to it is a 3.5mm audio socket. It seems that there are two speaker grills at the bottom of the handset, although only one of these is a speaker. The second design element is the power and volume buttons on the right side, although they are slightly lower than we would like. The microSD card tray is also placed on this side. At the same time, there is another tray on the left which is for two micro-SIM cards.
The front and back panels are made using Gorilla Glass 3. We were disappointed with the metallic rim on the sides of the handset as it started showing scratches within a day or two of normal use.
We would suggest you use the flip cover that comes with this handset, I wish it was a little more beautiful.
Specification
Intex has used the latest 1.3 GHz quad-core MediaTek MT6735 processor in it. The company has heavily promoted that the handset is equipped with 3 GB of RAM which is revolutionary for this price range. The inbuilt storage is 16 GB out of which 10 GB is available for the user. The good thing is that it has support for microSD card up to 128 GB. It comes with USB-OTG feature.
Intex has for some reason used a 720×1280 pixel AMOLED panel which is not great for a 5-inch screen in this price range. The screen is a bit dull and it is very hard to read anything in sunlight. You will immediately realize that the screen is weaker than expected.
There is support for LTE (Band 40). Other common connectivity features are also present in the handset. The rear camera has a 13 megapixel sensor and the front camera is 5 megapixels. The battery is 2300 mAh.
The Aqua Ace smartphone comes with Android 5.1 and the company has not customized it much. The default icons look very bad. We had trouble using the custom keyboard provided in it. We disabled it immediately.
Performance
We have already said that we did not like the screen of the Intex Aqua Ace very much. It is suitable for most tasks, but we have seen better screens at this price. We did face issues with the phone heating up. This was happening even when we were not doing any demanding tasks on the device. At times, it became difficult to hold the handset in our hands. One strange thing was that this phone had trouble finding 4G networks in many areas while other phones were doing so easily.
We found that there were occasional problems in playing 720p video files. 1080p video files played with a lot of lag. The performance of the inbuilt speaker was very poor, the sound was not clear even at low volume levels. The headphones that come with the handset are fine for voice calls but are not at all suitable for music. The results of the benchmark test were good.
The camera disappointed the most. Photos taken in daylight showed lack of focus on most occasions. Details were completely lost and there was a strange artificiality in every picture. Closeup shots also point to the poor performance of the camera. Photos taken indoors were even worse.
On the other hand, what surprised us the most was the battery performance. In the video loop test, the battery lasted for 10 hours and 14 minutes. Given the battery capacity, we were expecting a poor result.
Our verdict
Intex has heavily promoted the handset as having 3GB of RAM which is revolutionary for a handset of this price. To be honest, it doesn’t really matter. We would have liked the handset to have a better display and build quality. We were skeptical about the phone’s battery life but the performance surprised us.
All things considered, we feel Intex has failed to find the right formula so far. At this price point or even less, there are better phones available in the market. These include the big-display Lenovo K3 Note (Review), Xiaomi Mi 4i (Review) and the Motorola Moto G (Gen 3) (Review).
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