iVOOMi Me 5 Review: A cheap 4G VoLTE smartphone

iVOOMi, a Chinese brand owned by Suntek Global, a Hong Kong-based firm, has made its way to India recently. The company has come in to bring some budget friendly devices with support to 4G VoLTE. In the moving smartphone industry, customer's needs are being fulfilled but at a price. Smartphone manufacturers have been concentrating on giving a good build quality, excellent camera and some decent performance. What these manufacturers tend to forget is the budget of some people. In this generation, there are some people around the world who cannot afford the costly devices but still like to use the 4G VoLTE services and enjoy the use of social-media, banking and many more applications. iVOOMi Me 5 is a device which brings 4G VoLTE enabled smartphone with Android Nougat at a very cheap price. Here is our in-depth review of the new iVOOMi Me 5.

Specifications

As far as the specifications are concerned, the Me 5 sports a 5-inch display with a resolution of 1280x720 pixels with 2.5D curved glass. The smartphone comes with 2 GB of RAM and 16 GB of onboard storage which is further expandable up to 128 GB via a microSD card. Under the hood, the Me 5 packs in a 3,000mAh battery with no support to fast-charging. The phone runs on Android 7.0 Nougat out-of-the-box.

Performance

Performance of the Me 5 is nothing much to talk about as it is a budget device. The phone gave us decent performance when it came to using the phone for some calls, messages, browsing, WhatsApp and Instagram. The phone was able to handle some games like the Subway Surfers and the Temple Run.However, the phone is not meant for heavy gaming.

Camera

The camera on the Me 5 is not the best but can take some decent outdoor shots. The phone sports an 8-megapixel rear camera, while the front camera is a 5-megapixel selfie shooter The phone is capable of taking good photographs under good lighting conditions. However, the phone does tend to struggle when it comes to indoor lighting conditions. Here are some sample shots for you to judge.

Also Read: Nokia 6 Review: Best Budget Smartphone?

Battery Life

iVOOMi Me 5 impressed us when it came to battery life. The phone was easily able to last one full working day with 4G data enabled all the time. We did our review using a 4G VoLTE sim card, which in our case was Jio 4G.

Software & UI

iVOOMi didn't include a heavy skin with the Me 5, which is a great news as stock android on this phone is much smoother. However, it is not complete stock android as we can see a custom icon pack and a few small customizations here and there. But it was a nearly stock experience. During our review, we were not comfortable with the stock launcher so we switched to Nova Launcher and rest of the software was good enough. The interesting part is that we get Android Nougat at this price. Surprisingly, we also received a software update during our review.

Verdict

iVOOMi Me 5 is a great attempt by the company in delivering a good smartphone at a cheap price. As there is no perfect smartphone, this one also has some flaws. The phone was good for cellular reception and the 4G data, but the speaker quality could have been better. The picture quality delivered by the camera was average. The biggest disappointment was the touch on the smartphone which was not that responsive at times, but we cannot be sure for this as this could have been a problem with our unit. However, one cannot complain when the phone is priced this low. Some impressive things were, removable battery, Android Nougat and the support to 4G VoLTE. If you are looking for a smartphone with 4G VoLTE support under Rs. 5000, this could make a good choice and could also justify the price you pay for it.