The iBall Andi4a is the latest projector phone with the Android OS, and this time from an Indian manufacturer, in a good pricing which could be well worth it. Said to be the first device with 35 Lumens projector, the smartphone looks good in most of the aspects but how good is the processor, battery and the projector? Let’s see below in the detailed review.
iBall Andi4a Projector Phone Review
Design, Form Factor and Display
The device is quite thick in appearance, the thickness contributed by the projector, but the phone is not actually heavy, and from the front, it wouldn’t look any different from a standard phone with the touchscreen and the touch-sensitive buttons on the bottom of it, but yes, there’s a noticeable projector activation key in addition to the other three touch-sensitive ones below the screen. iBall has worked quite well to keep the design neat, though I would rate the Galaxy Beam better than this one when we talk of the projector phones, because the Beam didn’t gradually increase its size from the top to bottom.
The left side panel on the top has got the wheel for focusing the projection and that’s a little embedded within the body, making the wheel safer and useable only when the user intends to. The top doesn’t have a space left for the 3.5-mm headset jack, which gets pushed to the right panel just above the volume rocker keys.
There is no space on the top, which is full with the projector, the speaker grill and the key to unlock the screen. But everything seems appropriate at its position, and the position of the projector wouldn’t affect the user much. Overall, going by the design it’s all decent and doesn’t look bad in any way. But we have the spoilers below, where you would see how unresponsive the UI becomes after the projector usage.
User Interface, OS & Apps
It’s the standard Android Jelly Bean OS, interface having a few pre-installed apps and one of them that is noticeable is the app to toggle the projector functioning, but that can be just a secondary app because someone would want to directly press the Projector button on the bottom of the screen rather than going to the app and activating it, when they are already watching a movie.
In the app lists that you see below, except the AnTuTu Benchmark app, everything else comes pre-installed, one of the useful ones in them being the “Documents To Go” app which would come handy while you are in a meeting and wanted to share a document on a larger screen – just open the doc, activate the projector and direct it on a flat wall. That’s what this phone is made specifically for. All the other apps are just the ones which are available in most of the Android devices as the stock pack.
Projector Quality – Battery Draining & Projection Width
The actual USP of this device is the projector, which does a brilliant job in throwing the object on the wall/screen but you can’t just do it and relax as you can with the Galaxy Beam, because there’s a few things you need to take care of – Angles, Focusing and Mounting. A little different angle and the corners would stretch a lot, so you need to have the device almost perpendicular to the wall, and the focusing was not an issue in the Beam, but here iBall has given you the wheel to spin and adjust the focus which is not a bad option though, rather than being helpless when there’s no right focus and you don’t have an option to adjust it. For the mounting, iBall has provided a palm sized tripod with the stand on its head to hold the smartphone in position.
Now, the battery draining as we tested it – We tested the projector while playing the videos through Youtube and also while playing the videos that were loaded into the storage in the device. It could play exactly 13 minutes of video for a battery drain of 15% while streaming Youtube on landscape mode, and it went to 16 minutes when the video was played from the file system directly. So there’s no much difference when you are using the Wi-Fi to pull the content, but the projector itself is draining quite a lot of battery – About a hour and half for the full battery to drain while using the projector – so you cannot watch an entire movie on a single charge!
Internal Specs Detailing
The Dual-core processor of the Andi4a at 1GHz speed is not so bad, but what annoys is the 512 MB RAM, in which some is already into the use by the device processes itself. Also, the internal storage provided by the company is 4GB, of which they tell it straight to you on the box – around 2GB will be used by the system and the pre-installed apps. No complains about the storage though, this is a projector phone which would mostly be playing videos, documents and those can be stored in a MicroSD card, which could be taken to 32GB, the maximum this device can handle.
The UI Responsiveness Issue:
This is some serious issue that we faced after using the Projector in the iBall Andi4a, where once the projector is turned off, the screen goes unresponsive for some time, at least until you long press the power key to bring the options for powering off. We haven’t found any actual reason for this, but after the projector is used, the UI becomes buggy and slower than normal for a few minutes. That could be due to the heating of the upper half of the device? it got heated up a bit after a quarter hour movie projection but more than the heating (which is now common in many smartphones), it was the unresponsiveness of the screen which was more of a problem.
Camera – Capture Quality, Video Recording
The 8-megapixel lens seems to be one of a standard set by most of the brands to launch their smartphones with, and iBall has done the same in the Andi4a, which could capture some decent photos but you cannot call them the best for an 8 MP camera. The flash assistance doesn’t do much of a help even in the dark, as you have to rely on bright surroundings to take a good picture. The front cam does what it is meant to do – Video calling through Hangouts, Skype etc. with its VGA quality lens.
The camera, when compared to the Gionee Elife E5 camera (which too is a 8MP one, and the device is priced the same), shows a lot of blur and lacks detail when the particular areas in the photo are checked in full resolution, or when zoomed. Here’s a shot we took, and you can check the zoomed part and compare how the camera is not totally up to the mark.
Battery – Capacity, Charging Time, Usage
The 1500 mAh battery capacity is what would annoy someone who wanted this smartphone specifically for the projector. There are bugs which might be rectified, but the battery should have been something better, as one would expect at least a couple hours of continuous projector usage sometimes, even when you are in a meeting and trying to project some document sheets. But you will need to keep the device ready with some alternative sources of power supply, such as the portable chargers to keep the battery’s hunger checked while on continuous usage.
Final Verdict – iBall Andi4a Projector Phone
For a price of Rs. 18,000, the iBall Andi4a does hold itself good for one factor – the Projector. But it fails to impress us with the interface, the bugs we faced, excessive heating up and the low battery capacity. But if the device was to be that perfect, the price would have kept itself at par with that of the Galaxy Beam from Samsung which had introduced itself with the pricing of Rs. 30,000 initially. The projector is real good when properly aligned and at a right distance from the screen, but you shouldn’t expect much from the interface, camera and should have a backup for the battery which drains eventually, thanks to the temperature the device gets to. Our advice would be to wait and see if there’s something being done to fix the issue of the UI, or was this the only device we unluckily got with such issues? let’s see in the coming days. We would update this review soon, based on the user experiences.
Note: This device that we got was for the testing purpose, thus could be the reason why its buggy and we were the unlucky ones to find this, but out friends who are testing their units have not seen this issue. So do wait for a few days before the entire check is done.
