Review--Karbonn-A-9
Design:
Among the Indian manufacturers, Karbonn mobiles is a tough competitors to other brands. And their latest launch is Dual Sim Android smartphone A 9. The price of the device is Rs. 10,000 and it has a good design. The dimension of the handset is 120 mm, 60 mm and 11.3 mm in height, width and depth. It has a capacitive touch screen and the screen size measures 4 inches diagonally. On its top is a 3.5 mm earjack port and on its bottom is a USB/Charging port. The right depth holds a power/Lock key, whereas the left side has volume controls. Above its screen is earpiece and below the screen are capacitive touch keys for home, back and menu. The back side has a camera lens around the top and near to the bottom is a speaker grill. The body of the phone is all in plastic material and is handy too.
Interface/OS:
The Karbonn A 9 runs on Android 2.3 Gingerbread operating system. This phone is power backed by 1 GHz Qualcomm processor and 256 MB of RAM. When tested, the mobile functioned smoother but, delayed in multitasking and swapping applications because of its slower 256 MB of RAM.
Camera:
The Karbonn A 9 comes with an impressive 5 megapixels main camera with LED flash light and auto focus. It has a front facing camera for video calls and has good features too. When tested, the outdoor images were good and the indoor shots were impressive with artificial lights support but the colours were not rich. The camera captures the picture fast and the overall camera performance is fine.
Memory:
Karbonn A 9 comes with in-built 512 MB user accessible memory with 256 MB of RAM. The memory can be extended up to 32 GB through micro SD extension slot.
Battery:
Karbonn A 9 comes with a powerful standard Li-Ion 1600 mAh battery which has done full justice to this device. It delivers the stand by time of up to 170 hours on 2G and up to 125 hours on 3G. The music playback time is up to 15 hours and the Talk Time from the battery is up to 13 hours on 2G and up to 6.5 hours when on 3G. The overall battery performance was great with average daily use.
Audio/Video:
Karbonn A 9 delivers good audio quality and has a FM radio with RDS. It supports MP3, 3GPP, MP4, SMF, WAV, OTA and Ogg vorbis audio playback supported formats. 3GPP, MP4 and AMR are audio recording supported formats. The video quality of the phone when tested was just ok. The video playback and recording formats are 3GPP and MP4. When tested, camera performed average with its video quality.
Features:
Karbonn A 9 from is in-built with all basic Android smart phone features and applications and you can purchase or download latest android applications to your phone. In-built it has many social and other apps like, Facebook, Twitter, You Tube, etc. The list of pre-loaded application include: Google Search, Google Talk, Google Mail and Google Calendar. For connectivity and communication you have multiple options like USB High speed 2.0 and Micro USB support with Native USB tethering. WiFi and WiFi Hotspot functionality is also there. aGPS is in-built in the device and you have a WebKit web browser too. Bluetooth technology helps you pair with other devices and share data with them.
Conclusion:
The Karbonn A 9 is a good smart phone with dual sim functionality. This phone is much better than others in this price range. Its 1 GHz processor, 5 megapixels camera and Android 2.3 version as its main key features give it edge over its competitors. But its week 256 MB RAM can be a reason to think. So, we give this phone 4 star rating.
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