Smartron srt.phone: Does Tendulkar branded smartphone live up to the name?

Okay. How does a phone become the Sachin Tendulkar phone? Does it need to have a rich history of record-making and record-breaking? Or does it need to have a right-handed, medium paced approach?

Indian startup Smartron is backed by the cricketer and this is the second smartphone it has launched in the country. Pricing it upper budget segment, it clearly aims to have its space among the likes of Xiaomi Redmi Note 4, the Moto G or the Honor 6X from Huawei. These come in a metal body, or at in least metal frames, while the srt.phone is completely build out of polycarbonate, in an out.

It manages to look good in the hands with a light grey colour profile and symmetrical built. But it definitely doesn’t feel premium like the other three phones or give a solid reassuring feel in the hands for that matter. The volume keys feel loose in their place and the capacitive keys at the bottom are just three dots with no marking.

The lock button is placed at the top and being a 5.5-inch phone, this arrangement feels out of place for it. This may suit something like the iPhone 5S which has a 4.0-inch display. But it’s too far-fetched on the srt.phone. Also the back cover is removable but the battery is not which is quite funny.

But the fingerprint sensor placed at the back is also fast enough and you may not need to use the button that often to unlock the phone.

The 5.5-inch display on the device has Full HD (1080p) resolution. But you may want to believe otherwise. Colours appear dull and muted probably because of lack of enough brightness. Housed under a flat, unknown glass, the touch experience of the screen is satisfactory.

Another thing that looks good about the phone on paper is the internal hardware. The phone runs the Snapdragon 652 chipset with 4 GB RAM and 32 and 64 GB storage options. For the price, the hardware is the most competitive part of the phone. It competes head on with the Redmi Note 4 in this regard that offers a Snapdragon 625 chipset with 3GB of RAM for the same price.

To top that, it offers a stock Android interface built over the Android 7.0 Nougat. Only the Moto G5 offers the pure Android in this price range, but its specs are below what the srt.phone offers. In totality, the Sachin smartphone might be one of the fastest performing smartphones you could buy in this price segment.

The phone is fuelled by a 3,000mAh battery and supports fast charging via the Type C charging port. It ships with a travel charger and cable but no earphones.

The cameras on the phone are a mixed bag. At front there is a 5MP shooter and at the rear there is a 13MP camera. While their colour reproduction is nice and rather quite accurate, the low light noise control is out of order. While taking landscape shots, the details get messed up and you get a below average shot to your surprise. The front camera is nothing extraordinary either and you would need a steady hand in low light to get a useable selfie.

Overall, the srt.phone needed more than just good specs to achieve what it aims to do. Probably because the phone uses a chipset that has a history of heating up that the phone uses a polycarbonate build. And not sealing the phone completely must make the repairing easier. May be. But nothing explains mediocre cameras and loose buttons. Though Smartron has priced the phone very well, it has given it a heavy name to live up to.

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