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Interface and reliability
One of the major highlights of the t.Phone P is its near stock Android experience. The smartphone comes with Android 7.1.1 Nougat, topped with Smartron experience apps, including the t.store, t.cloud and t.care. Along with this, Smartron has loaded a bunch of apps like Microsoft's Office suite, Skype, Forums app and Google Duo, which unfortunately cannot be uninstalled. This is a bummer and gets in the way of what could have been a clean user experience. Smartron should have allowed users to uninstall them.
Otherwise, the UI is slick and we didn’t face any lags during our use. It’s as stock as they come, except for the aforementioned issue. It runs on Android Nougat right now, and there's no word on when it will get Android Oreo.
Specs and Performance
The t.Phone P is powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 435 octa-core chipset, which is generally what powers every second smartphone in this budget. Paired with 3GB of RAM, the phone performs well. It was able to run games like Clash of Clans flawlessly and even graphics hungry games, such as Shadow Fight 3. Though the phone did get warm while playing the latter one.
When it comes to multitasking, the phone is able to switch between 4-5 apps simultaneously, accompanied by frame drops and lags.
The dual-firing speakers at the bottom are possibly the worst part of the smartphone. They sound just plain bad. If you are going to watch videos or listen to music, we recommend using earphones.
The performance of the t.Phone P isn’t groundbreaking. Smartron has played it safe with the hardware that they have put together and frankly, it’s not bad to use at all.
Camera
The Smartron t.Phone P comes with a 13-megapixel primary snapper, which has an aperture size of f/2.2.and a 5-megapixel selfie camera on the front. The images coming out of the rear camera are decent, but the front-facing camera needs a lot of work.
From the rear camera, images shot often look washed out. There seems to be a whitish tone over the photos, which make them underwhelming. The phone also overexposed when shooting in outdoor sunlight, while low light shots were filled with noise and blurs.
There’s a manual mode as well which feels gimmicky. It doesn’t let you adjust anything except ISO and white balance.
The front-facing camera for selfies will make for your usual Instagram and Snapchat posts. Anything beyond that is just expecting too much out of an entry-level smartphone. Here, the Y1 from Xiaomi takes the cake for creating better pictures from the front camera.
Considering the price, the camera is just about fine, but don't expect much more. If camera isn't your priority, then you probably won't mind.
