Spice Mi-300 review

The handsets such as Galaxy S i9000, Xperia X10 or HTC desire in Android market is likely to be appreciated by the customers even if the price is above 25,000 mark. We will be very pleased if we are offered a handset which has lower price with similar characteristics. The Indian telecom operator Spice has introduced one such handset which is Android 2.1 powered and is available for Rs. 9900 as an introductory price. It is the Spice Mi-300 under Connected Spice Life banner. So it is termed as customer friendly and has killer attributes.

Design

The spice Mi-300 is a touch screen phone with 3.2” screen size. It is not that cute when compared to Corby but we can think of it as something a geek or a DIYer would carry. Its front is black in color and has a plastic body at the back. It has a stunning decent design with silver rim covering the side edges. It has a sleek design and hence can comfortable fit in pocket. The screen is not fingerprint proof and hence looks nasty with it as even after wiping the prints, it doesn’t go away easily. This affects the phone’s appearance and readability in bright light.

At its front it has a capacitive touchscreen and the screen is responsive as it recognizes most of our finger taps. The pinch zoom actions are not accurate and it supports multi-touch input. The screen has a resolution of 320 x 480 pixels and weighs 114 g. Most of the initial Android phones use this resolution. When compared to WQVGA and QVGA resolutions on Samsung Galaxy or Wildlife, it is much better. It has a good readability with no blurry edges on the front because of its higher number of pixels. To automatically adjust the brightness to the surroundings it has an ambient light sensor. You can barely read anything on the screen at bright sunlight and text appears hazy while scrolling in dark background are the two major flags.

Below the screen are the 4 touch sensitive buttons as in most of the Androids today. These are the menu, back key, search and home buttons. The search button does not work well. We have to press it hard for the browser to get open. On either of the touch keys there is no backlighting. These keys are hardly visible in the dark and you need to keep trying till you are lucky enough.

Below the four buttons is a trackball. On both sides of the trackball are accept and end keys. The micro USB port is protected by cover and is at the left side of the phone. The camera shutter button and the volume control keys are to the right. At the top are the 3.5mm earphone jack and power button which is at times hard to press. The camera is at the back and also is a LED flash bulb. At the bottom is the speaker grille.

Features

• Display: 3.2” 480 x 320, HVGA

• Memory: 156 MB

• Memory card support capacity: Up to 32 GB

• Camera: 5 MP

• Processor: 600 MHz Android 1.6

• Price: Rs. 9900 as introductory price

The Spice Mi-300 is a touchscreen Android phone that features G-sensor, E-compass, Push E-mail, proximity Sensor, GMS and MS Office, GPS and A-GPS, Accelerometer, Downloadable applications more than 1,00,000, support for Google mobile services. It supports easy navigation, has 3G HSDPA, Camera, Camcorder and gallery interface. The phonebook capacity has no limit and has microSD memory card type. It supports Polyphonic/MP3 Ringtones and Motion Sensor G-sensor. It has simple games such as Jigsaw and Picture Puzzle. Spice Mi-300 handles UI well.

Performance

In Spice-Mi-300, we faced problem with call quality. It was not very clear. In noisy places the caller’s voice will be hardly heard. The problem is in the earpiece as the voice sounded good with the use of ear-piece. The reception of network is also not that very good. The 5MP camera was good. It delivers good audio quality and the battery life is above average. It provides up to 590 hours of talktime for WCDMA and 400 Hours for GSM. The standby time is 6 hours for WCDMA and 7 hours for GSM. Video recording is at 30 fps for WVGA H.263 and 15fps for H.264.