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Battery life
- Awful results in our battery test
- Can just about last a day of mixed use
- Slow to charge
Using a low-end CPU might make you hope for fairly good battery life in the IMO Q, but that too is poor. Playing a 720p video at maximum brightness for 90 minutes took a disastrous 53% off the battery.
By comparison the Wileyfox Spark - which also has disappointing battery life - dropped by 35% in the same test, while the Moto E (2015) dropped just 22%.
Day-to-day the IMO Q doesn’t seem quite this bad, and we did get much more familiar “just about a day” performance in general use. However, this is probably because the phone’s performance discourages you from using the thing much.
Our browsing habits took a nosedive because skipping around websites is often a trial using the IMO Q.
We’re not quite sure why video playback proved such an epic fail either, as the 1450mAh battery sounds about right for a 4-inch 480 x 800 display. One possible explanation is that the IMO Q doesn’t manage its CPU power properly when given a fairly light task like video playback.
Charging is also slow. You’ll need to charge overnight ideally as a full recharge takes a few hours.
Camera
- Poor image quality
- Fairly effective HDR mode
The IMO Q has extremely basic cameras. A 5MP camera sits on the back, a 2MP selfie shooter up front.
While the rear camera has a flash to help your nighttime portraits, it misses out on an even more rudimentary feature - autofocus. A fixed-focus lens means you can’t shoot close-up shots.
You have almost zero control while shooting, as pressing the screen doesn’t even alter the exposure to suit your subject.
Given no focusing is involved, you might assume the IMO Q is going to be quick to shoot. It’s not. There’s a full second of shutter lag between pressing the shutter button and the shot actually being taken, making the process of using the camera frustrating.
Image quality is poor in all conditions, photos appearing noisy and fizzy even with perfect lighting. Contrast is poor, colours often undersaturated and the level of detail captured unimpressive.
The one brief highlight is the camera app’s HDR mode, which is fairly effective, and dynamic range adjustments are sound even when HDR isn’t used.
Given the price of the IMO Q, we could forgive the dodgy image quality if the camera was at least fun to use, but it’s just too slow for that.
You can capture video too, but only at 720p. It’s also subject to the same washed-out look as the photos if you shoot indoors.
The front camera comes across a little better, but largely only because ‘minimum’ standards for selfie shooters have improved in recent years. A phone like this would once have had a VGA camera, but the 2MP one here can at least render some finer detail.
In the wider field of sub-£100/$100/AU$170 budget phones it’s still fairly limited, though. White balance is often off and tight-knit textures can cause some truly weird looking image distortion effects. It’ll do for quick Twitter selfies, mind.
Camera samples
