Karbonn is not a really well know brand in the Indian smartphone market in the mid-range and high-end sector, but it has done quite a lot of releases in the past in the budget range. Recently, Flipkart has been the favorite spot for the brands to do some exclusive launches, and Karbonn is no expection there as Flipkart and Karbonn launched three smartphones with very cheap prices. The best in three was the Karbonn A11* (Karbonn A11 Star), which was priced at Rs. 4499, and it came in with some decent specs. We tested out this phone for over a week, and here’s the review of the smartphone.
External Form Factor
The first and most important part for the ones who hold it as the most important one – the Karbonn A11* runs Android 4.4.2 KitKat OS. Now, talking about the external hardware, the device is all plastic and pretty light. The back panel extends itself to cover the sides as well, and there is a clear separation noticed between the front and the sides, and there is some comfort provided by the curved sides. The front has a 4.3-inch display, and there is a lot of space wasted above and below it. Though one can ignore the top part where the camera, sensors and the earpiece are located, but there is nothing except the Karbonn branding the bottom, because the system buttons are the onscreen one.
The sides have a proper physical key placement, with the Power key on the right and volume rocker on the left. The MicroUSB slot on the top can be questioned because that makes it not possible to dock the phone in any stand. Alongside the MicroUSB port, there is a 3.5mm headset jack. The bottom part of the phone has a Mic with the groove to open the back cover. On the rear side, there’s a 5-megapixel camera with the LED flash, and the speaker grill near the bottom.
For the comfort, this is a very good device because it isn’t heavy at all, and you get the comfort with the form factor. The black variant’s back cover is a fingerprint magnet, or we could say it also attracts the dust because the plastic back is totally plain. Popping the back cover out, it exposes the battery, MicroSD card slot and the two SIM card slots. The primary one is a normal sized SIM while the second one is a Micro-SIM.
Display
Quite disappointing, not just with the resolution but also with the brightness. The WVGA resolution doesn’t really put out the content well but that is already a number seeing which you shouldn’t expect much. But when under natural sunlight conditions, you will find it hard to view the content on the 4.3-inch display. The viewing angles are quite fine, because we were able to read the content from the side angles and it was quite bright on full brightness in the artificial light conditions, so overall not a bad one, but you are asking too much if you wanted the display to give a great color and brightness.
Camera
For a 5-megapixel camera, Karbonn has done some attempt to at least provide the manual and auto focus to what could be a disaster for a camera lens. While we criticized Moto E for not giving the autofocus, the Karbonn A11* is no different in capture quality, except that you could touch and focus on a particular object, which easily gets pixelated and you won’t be able to appreciate if you are looking for some details in the object.
The camera app too is quite simple, with no modes or such. And that is quite understandable, because when you don’t get a decent capture normally, how different would it be in special modes and effects? There’s the HDR mode which demands you to keep it very stable for a capture, yet fails to capture something which can be called an HDR output. Following are a few capture samples.
Here are a few camera samples, which would do nothing else than make you feel that the camera is something you shouldn’t expect anything from, in the Karbonn A11*.
Camera Sample 1: Standard outdoor capture, does have a decent quality.
Color reproduction was pretty bad, with pixelation clearly seen.
Tried to check the background objects. No proper focusing, thus no blur on background.
Performance and OS
Benchmark scores wise, it is more than what one would expect from a device being powered by a Mediatek dual-core chipset and 512MB RAM. But here, the benchmark scores and the performance tell two different stories. The performance is a little sluggish, and it is a blame on both the touchscreen as well as the internal hardware that the touch response is noticeably bad. We do keep in mind that this phone is in a range where many brands don’t even launch a smartphone, thus for what you are paying, you won’t really be disappointed. To add to that, you are being given the latest Android OS version, i.e. Android KitKat 4.4.2 based on the Stock ROM.
Following are the benchmark scores which the Karbonn A11* got for the AnTuTu, Quadrant Standard and Vellamo tests that we did on the device.
There is the entire list of Google Play services pre-installed in the phone, alongside a few other apps such as Flipkart (which was obvious), OLX, Opera Mini, Quick Office, K Apps, ToDo and a couple games. The home screen is standard, and there’s the quick settings section under Notification panel, and the power button has the options to turn the device off, reboot it, and sometimes if the device doesn’t respond to touch, you can press and hold the power button for 11 seconds for a force reboot.
The internal storage could be quite an issue, just as the RAM is. What you get initially as an internal storage is about 1.3 GB although there is a MicroSD card slot. But something good for the users here is that you get to shift the items directly to SD card from your internal storage in the device. The 512MB RAM is quite less, although Karbonn has tried its efforts to give a good performing phone with the low RAM. There were 2 apps in the background, and as soon as we started one of the Benchmarking apps, it said that around 60MB of RAM is free, thus the cleanup is needed.
Call, Media and Speaker Quality
The calling is quite good, with a good signal reception. But, there is no secondary mic and thus, there is no noise cancellation. Thus, whatever you talk with the background noise, is all the same with no modification. The speaker grill is located on the back, which we are never a fan of. The speaker is not the perfect and there is a scratchy noise when playing music on full volume.
Battery and Final Verdict
The battery in the Karbonn A11* isn’t really promising, because on a very normal usage, although it lasted for more than half a day, we could see it draining too fast when browsing the web even on Wi-Fi. There was some issue with the Wi-Fi connectivity where the connection kept dropping for some reason, and this instead lead to more battery drain.
Overall, the Karbonn A11* is quite a decent device, and what you pay is what you get – because for this pricing, there is rarely any entry-level smartphone running the Android KitKat OS, and thus you have to keep the expectations low. On the other side, if you are looking for some good usage, you shouldn’t go for this because the low RAM could disappoint you when you cannot multitask.
