28 April,2015 08:05 AM IST | | Hassan M Kamal
Again, Karbonn impresses with its lightweight smartphone; but in doing so, they have compromised on the most crucial component, its battery. Hassan M Kamal finds out
Karbonn Titanium Mach Two
Rating: 8/10, Design: With protective glass paneling on both sides and cute volume rockers, the Titanium Mach Two is Karbonn's attempt at copying two popular devices. At which, it has been very successful. Despite its blocky feel, the phone looks gorgeous; something that is hard to come by in the under-10K segment. But that's not all. Weighing just 112 gms, the Karbonn Mach Two is also one of the lightest devices in the range. The glass panel on the back adds to the charm. But can looks alone win customers?
Rating: 7/10, Display: The Mach Two gets a 5-inch 1280x720 IPS display, which is comfortable to use, but at times, you can spot flickers on the screen. The touch, however, is responsive. The menu buttons are placed on the device, which gives you some more screen space. The colours and brightness are good too, but the light sensor
is a bit slow and often requires manual adjustments.
Rating: 7/10, Hardware: The 1.4GHZ Octa Core processor is lightning fast. We didn't face any problems while playing games, but the 1GB RAM seems to slow it down a little while multi-tasking; especially if you are doing tasks like editing and browsing at the same time or while juggling multiple apps (double tap the home button). However, this issue is faced in some high-end devices too. Fortunately, there's no heating problem either. The device's in-built speaker works perfectly well during phone calls; however, the mic seems to struggle a bit. The loudspeaker, placed right at the bottom along the edges, works well and is loud enough to meet most of your needs.
OS and User Interface: The device runs on Android Kitkat 4.4 with a customised user-interface on top of it. Though, Karbonn deserves some points for the effort (especially the gesture-based features); the result is not very impressive. Our advice is to install and use the Google Now Launcher instead.
Camera: The device gets 8MP front as well as back camera, but the picture quality is very poor. Flash or no flash, the pictures are often washed out, overexposed and grainy.
Connectivity: The Mach Two is another 3G smartphone that supports the regular 2G and 3G cellular bands along with Wi-Fi b/g/n and Bluetooth 4.0. There's nothing much to write about, really. However, cast-screen support is available, and could be of interest to some. However, there are better options in the same price range.
Battery: One of the major drawbacks of the Karbonn Titanium Mach Two (like the Mach One) is its battery. The 1,900 mAh is too low for a 3G phone and gets over within 6-7 hours of moderate usage on 3G; at times even less.
Overall rating: 5.6/10
The guide Verdict: Karbonn seems to have missed their chance to make a good device here. It had a good looking design and offers Gorilla Glass 3 protection (this is highly ignored in budget smart phones), but it has compromised on the battery, thus throwing away a fine opportunity to get a decent slice of the market pie.
