Intex Elyt Dual review: Budget selfie camera phone with surprising tricks up its sleeves
Home-bred phone-maker Intex Technologies earlier this month launched the new selfie-centric Elyt Dual mobile in India.
As the name suggests, Intex Elyt Dual sports a two cameras on the front with the Bokeh blur effect. It also has a dedicated LED flash on the front and costs Rs 6,999, making it one of the most affordable camera sphone in the market. But is it good enough to buy? Let’s check out.
Design and display:
Intex Elyt Dual flaunts a candy-bar design with gorgeous curved corners and a smooth shell on the back. The phone has a good paint job with dark-grey antenna lines perfectly blending with the dark black rear-case. It has a round camera module with LED flash at centre on top, with the silver-hued Intex branding engraving below.
Though it has a plastic-based removable shell on the back, the build quality is impressive and capable enough to withstand accidental falls.
However, we found the speaker placement on the back a bit ill-advised, as the audio gets distorted when the phone is kept on the table with the rear side facing down.
Another aspect we found a bit annoying in the Intex Elyt Dual is that there are no back-lit capacitive buttons on the front-panel. It was hard for me to go back and forth on apps when using the device at night.
But, it’s not a deal-breaker, as my finger muscles got used the location of the buttons — back (right), recents (left) and home (centre) — within two days.
As far as the display is concerned, it is pretty decent for a budget device. Intex Elyt Dual sports a 5.0-inch HD screen with 2.5D curved glass, which also adds to the visual appeal.
In terms of practicality, there was hardly any strain on my eyes to view contents on the screen in the bright sunny conditions, as there are options to control brightness.
1/7
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Intex Elyt Dual comes with pretty solid shell cover on the back -
Intex Elyt Dual features a mic, a microUSB port and a 3.5mm audio jack at the base edge -
Intex Elyt Dual comes with clean smooth surface with no physical keys on the left side -
Intex Elyt Dual houses a power button and volume rockers on the right side -
Intex Elyt Dual top-edge -
Intex Elyt Dual sports a 5.0-inch HD IPS LCD screen with 2.5D curved glass cover on top -
Intex Elyt Dual come packed with a 2,400mAh removable battery
Performance:
Intex Elyt Dual houses a 32-bit Quad Core Spreadtrum 9850 chipset backed by 2GB RAM and 16GB storage with the option to expand up to 128GB via microSD card.
It works just fine in terms of speed, be it app launches, switching between multiple applications and running regular games such as Candy Crush, Angry Birds and Temple Run. But Intex Elyt Dual, like other entry-level phones, is not built to perform well with graphics-intense games.
As far as the user-interface is concerned, it runs Android 7.0 Nougat and to an extent is a bit clean compared to other brands, which cram phones with unnecessary apps and leave very little for end-users to enjoy, and most often they have to buy microSD cards to store data like pictures and videos.
Intex Elyt Dual comes with close to 12GB of user storage, good enough to store a lot of photos and songs.
Camera:
Intex Elyt Dual comes with 2MP (f/2.0 1.12 µm pixel size) 8MP (f/2.2 1.75 µm pixel size) snappers having dedicated LED flash and support Real Bokeh Effect (Realtime & Capture), Background Change, Night Shot, Face Beauty, Face Detection, Panorama, Burst Mode. On the back, it comes packed with an 8MP snapper on the back with autofocus, f/2.2 aperture, 1.2µp pixel size, single-LED flash support.
The highlight of the new Intex Elyt Dual is its front camera. It houses 2MP (f/2.0 + 1.12 µm pixel size) + 8MP (f/2.2 + 1.75 µm pixel size) front snappers with dedicated LED flash, and these support Face Beauty, Face Detection, Panorama, Burst Mode and more.
During our tests, the Elyt Dual’s front-shooter did not disappoint at all and we were particularly impressed by the background change feature, though this needs some practice to get used to. But eventually after mastering, it sure got us addicted. This is a really nifty value-added feature that we hardly see in any other phones in the entry-level category.
1/4
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Intex Elyt Dual camera samples taken in the afternoon -
Intex Elyt Dual’s primary camera sample taken in the evening -
Intex Elyt Dual review: Budget phone with decent selfie camera -
Intex Elyt Dual review: Budget phone with decent selfie camera
It also boasts Audio Pics, which lets users add audio snippets (10 seconds) to a photo, Night Shot mode, to enhance picture quality taken in low-light, and Bokeh (realtime and after capture) effect, which gives users the option to blur the background around the subject.
As far as picture quality is concerned, the phone takes decent images, which are on a par with any other budget phone we see in the market.
On the back, it comes packed with an 8MP snapper with Auto Focus, f/2.2 aperture, 1.2µp pixel size, and single-LED flash support. The image quality of the primary camera is average, but on a par with other phones in its price category.
Battery:
Intex Elyt Dual comes packed with a removable 2,400mAh battery.
With a compact body and a 5.0-inch HD screen, it lasted a whole day (my active hours: 5 am to 10 pm) under mixed usage, which included WhatsApp messaging, few sessions of YouTube videos and web browsing including social media sites.
Final thoughts 3:
Intex Elyt Dual comes with a decent package, which ticks most of the required parameters to call it a selfie-oriented phone. It suits particularly those migrating from a feature phone to a smartphone for the first time.
But, having said that, Intex phone faces a lot of competition from popular handsets such as Xiaomi Redmi Y1 Lite, the Redmi 5A, the Motorola Moto C series and the Lenovo K8 series.
Pros:
- Decent dual front camera and surprisingly feature-rich photo-editing application for its price
- Day-long battery under mixed usage
- Reliable build quality
Cons:
- No back-lit navigation buttons, and speaker placement on the back
- Primary camera could have been better