Innelo 1 unboxing Review

Overview

Recently, it has been a trend on both Google and Social media for brands to branch out with a separate sub-brand. We have recently seen Xiaomi and Redmi do the same with POCO and Realme, respectively. The latest to join the bandwagon is yet another Chinese handset maker, Innelo 1. The Innelo 1 comes in a white cardboard box with the phone’s visual on top and core specs listed on the bottom. Upon lifting the lid, you are greeted by the smartphone with the wall charger, a micro-USB cable, a SIM-ejector tool, a transparent screen protector, earphones and documentation underneath.

Innelo 1 price is $106.09

Practically,iVOOMi brings to you technology-rich mobile phones at pocket-friendly prices. iVoomi hasn’t had as much of an impact on the market as some of its competitors, in hopes to change that with its “superior” sub-brand called Innelo. The company launched it back in September, claiming it was the first smartphone under $120 to sport a notch.

How Good is Innelo1?

INNELO ONE DESIGN

The Innelo 1 was built on a tight budget, one look at it clearly shows this. There’s no noticeable flex and the texture given to the plastics makes this phone look cheap. A semi-gloss body finish which shows fingerprints and smudges but not too much. It’s at 7.4mm*154g, not too heavy.

Innelo 1 camera ndtv innelo

It comes with a 5.85-inch HD+ display with a resolution of 1520×720 pixels (No Corning’s Gorilla Glass). Its brightness is quite high under bright light.

There’s a pretty wide notch on the top. The Innelo 1 also has noticeably thick borders on all sides of the display, and one of the biggest chins we’ve come across on a notched display. This design looks a little odd and doesn’t cat the eyes.

The buttons are placed on both side of the phone, The SIM tray is placed on the right and is upside down. it is a hybrid tray (two Nano-SIMs or a microSD card). Only one SIM connects to 4G at a time while the second defaults to 2G/3G.

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Credit Gadets360

Shockingly, No 3.5mm headphone jack. The Innelo 1 comes with a headset that has a Micro-USB plug. There isn’t any Micro USB to 3.5mm dongle in the box and the bundled headset sounds terrible. Gadget 360 asked Innelo about the reasoning behind this, and according to the company, “the hardware structure” prevented it from adding a headphone socket.

At the back there’s a sizeable camera, a single-LED flash and a fingerprint sensor placed in the middle.

In the box, the Innelo 1 is accompanied by the Micro-USB headset, a Micro-USB cable, a 10W charger, a SIM eject tool, and a screen guard.

Innelo 1 specifications and software

Powering the Innelo 1 is a rather old MediaTek MT6737H quad-core CPU, which is considerably slower in benchmarks than competing silicon such as the Qualcomm Snapdragon 430 and even MediaTek’s current Helio A22 SoC. The phone posted some of the lowest scores we’ve seen in a while for this price segment, with only around 40,307 points in AnTuTu and just 15fps in GFXbench’s T-Rex gaming test.

Innelo 1 apps ndtv innelo

The rest of the specifications aren’t anything to shout about either. There’s just 2GB of RAM and 16GB of storage. You get roughly 8GB free for apps and other files, and that fills up quickly if you download bigger apps, like games. There is an option to format a microSD card as part of the internal storage, which is good to see.

Other specifications include Bluetooth, Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n, GPS, an accelerometer, an ambient light sensor, and a proximity sensor. The phone lacks a compass, which means you can’t tell the direction you’re facing in Google Maps, and there isn’t even support for USB-OTG.

The Innelo 1 runs on Android 8.1 Oreo with a custom skin called SmartMe OS 3. The security patch was dated August 2018, which is now a bit old. This single-layered interface comes with a custom set of icons for the default apps and a theme store for changing the look of the UI.

Some of the preloaded third-party apps can’t be uninstalled, such as Amazon, NewsPoint and Gaana. Even trial games like Cupcake Dreamland and Bean Counter are treated as system apps and can’t be removed.

Innelo 1 performance, battery life, and cameras

The Innelo 1 on regular use didn’t get too hot, but when playing games the area around the fingerprint sensor got quite warm. There’s no way to set the scaling behaviour of individual apps, but after some digging around in the Settings app, we found a master switch to enable or disable fullscreen scaling in the System sub-menu, of all places.

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Image credit; Gadgets360

The fingerprint sensor isn’t that fast about a second or two before the display actually switches on, which makes it seem slow.

There’s face recognition too, but it wasn’t that responsive even under low/good light and slower than the fingerprint sensor.

The Innelo 1’s does get laggy when trying to switch between apps. It’s noticeable when opening two apps in split-screen mode. Basic apps work well, but at times even simple things like typing can feel laggy if you have many apps open in the background.

The Innelo 1 can handle basic games such as Alto’s Odyssey well enough, but Asphalt 9: Legends or even PUBG Mobile ran very sluggishly, even with the settings cranked all the way down.

CAMERA

There’s a 13-megapixel rear camera which has autofocus. Images shot in daylight were passable which did not show many details in color . Macro shots lacked good clarity. There’s no portrait shooting mode for the back camera.

The ‘FaceCute’ shooting mode lets you vary the level of beautification on your subjects’ faces. The ‘Smart Photo’ toggle automatically engages HDR if needed and sets up the scene based on available light.

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In low light, capturing a moving object was poor and takes a couple of seconds to lock focus. Details were soft and there’s there was visible noise and grain in dark regions of the photos we shot at night.

The front 5-megapixel camera captured soft images under good light, and slightly grainy ones in low light.

Video recording maxes out at 1080p but there’s no stabilisation and the framerate varies depending on the available light. During the day, we generally got about 15-20fps (which is too low) but in low light, it dropped all the way down to 10fps, which resulted in blurry and unusable footage. We noticed this inconsistency across resolutions.

Battery life is quite weak too. The 3000mAh battery lasted for just 6 hours and 15 minutes in our HD video loop battery test. With actual usage, the phone just about lasted an entire workday, but we had to charge it before going to bed. The bundled charger charges the phone completely in about two hours.

Final Verdict

The Innelo 1 is iVoomi’s debut offering for its sub-brand, but we think the company has completely missed the mark here. The phone lags behind the competition on pretty much every count, making it hard to give it any sort of recommendation. Its biggest failings are the weak processor, lack of a headphone socket, poor battery life, and thick bezels and chin on the display. The cameras are quite underwhelming too, and the software isn’t as up-to-date or feature-rich as what you’d get with many other offerings at this price level.I strongly recommend giving the Innelo 1 a trial.

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