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Spice Android One Dream Uno Mi-498 Review
*i.imgur.com/Ct2tBRA.jpg
Introduction
Indian market has been more like a holy grail for Smartphone vendors since the past couple of years or more. Both in the budget and high end segments, Smartphone’s have witnessed an unprecedented rise in share and revenue.
Although the high end segment users experience an unconstrained Smartphone experience, the same cannot be said for budget users. While the top of the line phones get flagship SoC’s to boot and timely software upgrades leading to a full scale experience, the others are marred with sub par SoC’s , hardware and barely get updates. The result is a choppy and slapped up experience with several software stability issues.
Enter Google with its Android One platform. An idea that promises to deal with all above issues, giving the same Smartphone experience as flagship users to the mainstream user base. Like its nexus line up, the android one platform promises Google certified hardware and regular OS updates for full 2 years. The OEM’s that undertake building the final product has to cater to these standards set by Google, ensuring top notch quality and optimization.
In its current avatar, three OEM’s i.e Micromax , Karbonn & Spice have joined the bandwagon and more in likes of Asus, Lenovo ,Acer, Qualcomm(SOC provider), HTC etc are soon to follow.
The one I’m reviewing is Spice’s version of Android One dubbed the Mi-498. I chose this against Micromax and Karbonn’s version simply because it was a couple of bucks cheaper. All three Android One phones are aesthetically identical.
Key Features:
SoC – MTK 6582 1.3Ghz Quadcore A7 + Mali 400MP
Ram – 1gb
Rom – 4gb
Display - 4.5 inches IPS display
Resolution – 854x480 217 ppi
Memory -Expandable memory upto 32 gb
Sim - Dual Sim with both sims supporting 3G
Operating Frequency – GSM 850, 900 , 1800 ,1900 UMTS- 2100
Battery -1700mAh Li-Polymer Battery
Primary Camera – 5MP AF
Secondary Camera – 2MP
Android version – 4.4.4 (Kitkat)
Dimensions – 67 x 132 x 9.15 mm
Weight – 107 grams
Video Recording – 1080p FullHD
SAR value – 0.614 W/Kg
Sensors – Accelerometer, Proximity, Magnetic sensor, Gyro Sensor
CPU - Z Screenshots
Design & Build
Having used a Moto G (Gen 1) , I can safely say that Spice’s Android one device(going to refer as Mi-498 from now on) looks exactly the same , sporting the same dimensions, look and feel. The overall phone is 5 inches including bezels, whereas the actual screen size is 4.5 inch with a resolution of 480x854 WVGA display. The earpiece’s design is identical to Nexus 5, as well as the back speaker. As with nexus devices, there are no physical home and back buttons in this device. Users have to rely on the ones coming with the OS menu, which is pretty nifty in my opinion.
The volume and power buttons on the left have a nice tactile feedback and ooze quality. The back panel flows seamlessly with the phone’s design and houses the OEM logo (Spice in this case) and “android one” logo, just above the back speaker grill. The panel although plastic has a nice velvety finish offering a sturdy grip, which doesn’t feel slippery to hold. The phone itself fits an average palm perfectly. The back panel feels very up market considering the base price of this device. The top side houses a standard 3.5 mm jack while the rear has a micro USB slot for the obvious usage.
The phone sports a 5 megapixel Auto Focus camera in the rear with Flash, and the front houses a 2 megapixel camera for video conferencing and selfies.
Overall, the design and build are more than satisfactory and exudes a premium feel. Google was indeed serious with the Android One platform.
Here are some pics:
Display
The Mi-498 houses a 4.5 inch IPS display with a native resolution of 854x480 equaling 217 ppi. Might not sound impressive on paper but these figures are deceptive about what’s in store. Not only the display is bright with excellent viewing angles (178 deg), it feels like a QHD display. Side by side with a Moto E , I found the Mi-498’s display a tad better with brighter colors.
The only negativity I can think of is the sun light visibility. It’s a tad difficult to see the icons under sunlight and this is the only area where the display falters. Overall the display is more than good at this price range. Watching 1080p content is a breeze too and the color reproduction of this display is quite accurate, with natural hues.
SoC, OS and User Experience
Like I said before the hardware in these phones are Google certified. The Mi-498 along with all other android one devices, pack a mediatek MT6582 SoC having four ARM A7 cores sporting the ARMV7 32 bit architecture. The max clock speeds the cores can go upto are 1.3 Ghz. Accompanying the CPU is the GPU which is the Mali 400MP and 1 gb of RAM with 4gb internal storage. Thankfully there’s an additional expansion slot which can house upto a 32 gb micro sd card for additional storage.
That said, apart from the GPU, everything is top notch. The Mali 400MP isn’t bad but has been doing duties for quite a while now. An upgrade would have been better. Maybe future phones may address this part.
Being an android one device, the Mi-498 comes with the latest Android version i.e 4.4.4 or in other words KITKAT. This is a completely no frills stock version having no fancy UI on top or bloatwares to boot.
A clean and uncluttered android is just what the doctor ordered. Not only the touch is super responsive, the OS doesn’t even hint at any sort of lags. The browser performance is unseen in this price range. Chrome works like breeze and offers zero lag. Google has definitely optimized the software to extract the best out of the hardware inside. I’ll talk more about this in the “ Performance and benchmarks” section, where we’ll see that this version of mediatek 6582 performs the best, surpassing qualcomm 400 SoC’S.
Google Now works like a charm and one voice command “Okay Google” brings it in action. It responds to Indian accent better and Google has definitely worked on this part. I can safely say that this version of Google Now is the best yet. Google drive offers 15gb of space whereas spice cloud offers an additional 10gb.
The overall user experience is superb and definitely over all other Smartphones in this category. Feels very classy overall. It’s now safe to say that the stock android experience is the best experience.
Performance & Benchmarks
This is the section which most enthusiast and geeky users find relevant. I have used three benchmark suites to test the phone’s performance namely Antutu 5, Quadrant & Vellamo suite
Lets get down to the numbers:
AnTuTu 5
The AnTuTu benchmark measures overall device performance in all areas. From CPU integer, floating point performance, GPU rendering test,HTML5 browser interpretation, to overall memory read write, it is a complete test suite.
Following are the results I achieved:
The scores achieved here are the best ever in a mediatek 6582 device and beats Moto G too !
The HTML5 performance are reminiscent of the browser experience I’ve had with this phone. It’s terrific in this range.
Quadrant
Following are the results from Quadrant test suite:
Again a very good showing.
Vellamo
My favorite benchmark in this test. It has three specific benchmark suites namely Browser, Multicore & Metal.
Vellamo Browser
As the names suggest, the browser benchmark thoroughly test browser and JavaScript performance with a series of rigorous tests. This includes Sunspider’s infamous JavaScript benchmark that determines a browsers JavaScript interpretation potential. Along with this, Open-Gl based Web-GL graphics library supported with HTML5 API’s is also tested which shows an estimation of future browser based gaming and rendering performance on mobile devices.
The following results will give a clear picture:
The overall performance is again higher than Moto G! Clearly the browser experience in android one phones is proving to be excellent. Chrome shines especially.
Vellamo Multicore
This benchmark showcases system performance, inter process communication and execution of native Java code. Housing popular tools like Linpack, SysBench , MemBench etc. this benchmark shows an overall multithreaded performance of the device. All four cores are tested rigorously.
Fell a tad short of Moto G’s qualcomm SoC but still ends up with a respectable score beating the Galaxy S3 in the test suite. This explains the lag free experience of the device.
Vellamo Metal
This suite is a more serious in computational benchmark. Includes the popular Dhrystone measuring integer performance and other read write operations. It is a more close to the metal benchmark offering synthetic analysis.
In synthetics , it beats Moto G again ! The Nexus 4 also gets beaten despite housing a superior SoC.
Here is an overview of all three scores achieved.
The performance of the device is excellent in this range. Finally we have a device that offers an android experience, the way it’s meant to be.
Battery
Although the Mi-498 comes with a 1700mAh battery, its no slouch in this department either. Google had said earlier that the android one devices are meant to last a day easily. I can safely agree to their statements. The battery lasts exactly a day with approximately over 1 hour of calls, wifi on and decent browsing. This device delivers in battery and proves again Google’s commitment on providing quality hardware and optimizations even at this price range. There are also no heating issues with this device.
Camera
The Mi-498 comes with a decent 5MP Auto Focus snapper with an LED flash. The camera is strictly decent and has nothing home to write about. The camera needs better light source, or else the results will be noisy and grainy. In broad daylight the pictures are good enough to share in facebook or instagram. The stock camera app is straight out of nexus and provides nifty features like lens blur, Panorama and HDR toggle, really unseen in this range.
Sharing some snaps taken in daylight:
The device also records full 1080p videos which is very good. A 30 sec video takes roughly 60mb space in the SD card. The video quality is again great, but again light source plays a vital role or else videos will be grainy.
The overall camera is decent in this range but not exceptional.
Verdict
Google’s android one initiative has really stirred the mainstream segment. The future is even brighter considering the names joining the initiative. The phones exude quality in most departments, if not all. The initial lot from Micromax, Karbonn and Spice offers the same and this needs to be experienced to be believed. People ignoring these phones considering their image and brand value only will be in a big loss.
The most catchy part is the two full years of updates these devices promise, including Android L which does away with the Dalvik virtual machine & offers native execution speeds which closed source platforms like IOS offer. The android one platform proves that the stock android is indeed the best experience, and will let the mainstream user base experience what flagship users (Nexus)have been experiencing the whole time. The Mi-498 has really proved itself and surpassed all of my expectations.
A respectable 8/10 score from my side, considering the seamless user experience alone.
*i.imgur.com/Ct2tBRA.jpg
Introduction
Indian market has been more like a holy grail for Smartphone vendors since the past couple of years or more. Both in the budget and high end segments, Smartphone’s have witnessed an unprecedented rise in share and revenue.
Although the high end segment users experience an unconstrained Smartphone experience, the same cannot be said for budget users. While the top of the line phones get flagship SoC’s to boot and timely software upgrades leading to a full scale experience, the others are marred with sub par SoC’s , hardware and barely get updates. The result is a choppy and slapped up experience with several software stability issues.
Enter Google with its Android One platform. An idea that promises to deal with all above issues, giving the same Smartphone experience as flagship users to the mainstream user base. Like its nexus line up, the android one platform promises Google certified hardware and regular OS updates for full 2 years. The OEM’s that undertake building the final product has to cater to these standards set by Google, ensuring top notch quality and optimization.
In its current avatar, three OEM’s i.e Micromax , Karbonn & Spice have joined the bandwagon and more in likes of Asus, Lenovo ,Acer, Qualcomm(SOC provider), HTC etc are soon to follow.
The one I’m reviewing is Spice’s version of Android One dubbed the Mi-498. I chose this against Micromax and Karbonn’s version simply because it was a couple of bucks cheaper. All three Android One phones are aesthetically identical.
Key Features:
SoC – MTK 6582 1.3Ghz Quadcore A7 + Mali 400MP
Ram – 1gb
Rom – 4gb
Display - 4.5 inches IPS display
Resolution – 854x480 217 ppi
Memory -Expandable memory upto 32 gb
Sim - Dual Sim with both sims supporting 3G
Operating Frequency – GSM 850, 900 , 1800 ,1900 UMTS- 2100
Battery -1700mAh Li-Polymer Battery
Primary Camera – 5MP AF
Secondary Camera – 2MP
Android version – 4.4.4 (Kitkat)
Dimensions – 67 x 132 x 9.15 mm
Weight – 107 grams
Video Recording – 1080p FullHD
SAR value – 0.614 W/Kg
Sensors – Accelerometer, Proximity, Magnetic sensor, Gyro Sensor
CPU - Z Screenshots
*i.imgur.com/ZuZsAJR.png
*i.imgur.com/v9PL09F.png
*i.imgur.com/VxsarUn.png
*i.imgur.com/MXMKex5.png
*i.imgur.com/E6Wyoov.png
*i.imgur.com/Gey5Pde.png
*i.imgur.com/v9PL09F.png
*i.imgur.com/VxsarUn.png
*i.imgur.com/MXMKex5.png
*i.imgur.com/E6Wyoov.png
*i.imgur.com/Gey5Pde.png
Design & Build
Having used a Moto G (Gen 1) , I can safely say that Spice’s Android one device(going to refer as Mi-498 from now on) looks exactly the same , sporting the same dimensions, look and feel. The overall phone is 5 inches including bezels, whereas the actual screen size is 4.5 inch with a resolution of 480x854 WVGA display. The earpiece’s design is identical to Nexus 5, as well as the back speaker. As with nexus devices, there are no physical home and back buttons in this device. Users have to rely on the ones coming with the OS menu, which is pretty nifty in my opinion.
The volume and power buttons on the left have a nice tactile feedback and ooze quality. The back panel flows seamlessly with the phone’s design and houses the OEM logo (Spice in this case) and “android one” logo, just above the back speaker grill. The panel although plastic has a nice velvety finish offering a sturdy grip, which doesn’t feel slippery to hold. The phone itself fits an average palm perfectly. The back panel feels very up market considering the base price of this device. The top side houses a standard 3.5 mm jack while the rear has a micro USB slot for the obvious usage.
The phone sports a 5 megapixel Auto Focus camera in the rear with Flash, and the front houses a 2 megapixel camera for video conferencing and selfies.
Overall, the design and build are more than satisfactory and exudes a premium feel. Google was indeed serious with the Android One platform.
Here are some pics:
*i.imgur.com/M6djMAN.jpg
*i.imgur.com/9GfFO9z.jpg
*i.imgur.com/Rwar3Fo.jpg
*i.imgur.com/9GfFO9z.jpg
*i.imgur.com/Rwar3Fo.jpg
Display
The Mi-498 houses a 4.5 inch IPS display with a native resolution of 854x480 equaling 217 ppi. Might not sound impressive on paper but these figures are deceptive about what’s in store. Not only the display is bright with excellent viewing angles (178 deg), it feels like a QHD display. Side by side with a Moto E , I found the Mi-498’s display a tad better with brighter colors.
The only negativity I can think of is the sun light visibility. It’s a tad difficult to see the icons under sunlight and this is the only area where the display falters. Overall the display is more than good at this price range. Watching 1080p content is a breeze too and the color reproduction of this display is quite accurate, with natural hues.
SoC, OS and User Experience
Like I said before the hardware in these phones are Google certified. The Mi-498 along with all other android one devices, pack a mediatek MT6582 SoC having four ARM A7 cores sporting the ARMV7 32 bit architecture. The max clock speeds the cores can go upto are 1.3 Ghz. Accompanying the CPU is the GPU which is the Mali 400MP and 1 gb of RAM with 4gb internal storage. Thankfully there’s an additional expansion slot which can house upto a 32 gb micro sd card for additional storage.
That said, apart from the GPU, everything is top notch. The Mali 400MP isn’t bad but has been doing duties for quite a while now. An upgrade would have been better. Maybe future phones may address this part.
Being an android one device, the Mi-498 comes with the latest Android version i.e 4.4.4 or in other words KITKAT. This is a completely no frills stock version having no fancy UI on top or bloatwares to boot.
A clean and uncluttered android is just what the doctor ordered. Not only the touch is super responsive, the OS doesn’t even hint at any sort of lags. The browser performance is unseen in this price range. Chrome works like breeze and offers zero lag. Google has definitely optimized the software to extract the best out of the hardware inside. I’ll talk more about this in the “ Performance and benchmarks” section, where we’ll see that this version of mediatek 6582 performs the best, surpassing qualcomm 400 SoC’S.
Google Now works like a charm and one voice command “Okay Google” brings it in action. It responds to Indian accent better and Google has definitely worked on this part. I can safely say that this version of Google Now is the best yet. Google drive offers 15gb of space whereas spice cloud offers an additional 10gb.
The overall user experience is superb and definitely over all other Smartphones in this category. Feels very classy overall. It’s now safe to say that the stock android experience is the best experience.
Performance & Benchmarks
This is the section which most enthusiast and geeky users find relevant. I have used three benchmark suites to test the phone’s performance namely Antutu 5, Quadrant & Vellamo suite
Lets get down to the numbers:
AnTuTu 5
The AnTuTu benchmark measures overall device performance in all areas. From CPU integer, floating point performance, GPU rendering test,HTML5 browser interpretation, to overall memory read write, it is a complete test suite.
Following are the results I achieved:
*i.imgur.com/oZ2bPkj.png
*i.imgur.com/RYtyGmT.png
*i.imgur.com/eIDish2.png
*i.imgur.com/RYtyGmT.png
*i.imgur.com/eIDish2.png
The scores achieved here are the best ever in a mediatek 6582 device and beats Moto G too !
The HTML5 performance are reminiscent of the browser experience I’ve had with this phone. It’s terrific in this range.
Quadrant
Following are the results from Quadrant test suite:
*i.imgur.com/XhdwTtr.png
Again a very good showing.
Vellamo
My favorite benchmark in this test. It has three specific benchmark suites namely Browser, Multicore & Metal.
Vellamo Browser
As the names suggest, the browser benchmark thoroughly test browser and JavaScript performance with a series of rigorous tests. This includes Sunspider’s infamous JavaScript benchmark that determines a browsers JavaScript interpretation potential. Along with this, Open-Gl based Web-GL graphics library supported with HTML5 API’s is also tested which shows an estimation of future browser based gaming and rendering performance on mobile devices.
The following results will give a clear picture:
Browser
*i.imgur.com/sFKQ614.png
*i.imgur.com/8WZsZwo.png
*i.imgur.com/h3y0OoV.png
*i.imgur.com/ctZKP0X.png
Details
*i.imgur.com/n57peDW.png
*i.imgur.com/ijSAxaQ.png
*i.imgur.com/XbXVdRA.png
*i.imgur.com/dPKiUKz.png
*i.imgur.com/6mb9lAF.png
*i.imgur.com/sFKQ614.png
*i.imgur.com/8WZsZwo.png
*i.imgur.com/h3y0OoV.png
*i.imgur.com/ctZKP0X.png
Details
*i.imgur.com/n57peDW.png
*i.imgur.com/ijSAxaQ.png
*i.imgur.com/XbXVdRA.png
*i.imgur.com/dPKiUKz.png
*i.imgur.com/6mb9lAF.png
The overall performance is again higher than Moto G! Clearly the browser experience in android one phones is proving to be excellent. Chrome shines especially.
Vellamo Multicore
This benchmark showcases system performance, inter process communication and execution of native Java code. Housing popular tools like Linpack, SysBench , MemBench etc. this benchmark shows an overall multithreaded performance of the device. All four cores are tested rigorously.
Vellamo Multicore Benchmarks
*i.imgur.com/7CGW55u.png
*i.imgur.com/8uTohvH.png
*i.imgur.com/iEV8dwI.png
Details
*i.imgur.com/OeMtSJC.png
*i.imgur.com/YWrmItv.png
*i.imgur.com/z2to7Sa.png
*i.imgur.com/6nwfgyL.png
*i.imgur.com/jLNoD6v.png
*i.imgur.com/Wt1w6sJ.png
*i.imgur.com/Fy6cdef.png
*i.imgur.com/7CGW55u.png
*i.imgur.com/8uTohvH.png
*i.imgur.com/iEV8dwI.png
Details
*i.imgur.com/OeMtSJC.png
*i.imgur.com/YWrmItv.png
*i.imgur.com/z2to7Sa.png
*i.imgur.com/6nwfgyL.png
*i.imgur.com/jLNoD6v.png
*i.imgur.com/Wt1w6sJ.png
*i.imgur.com/Fy6cdef.png
Fell a tad short of Moto G’s qualcomm SoC but still ends up with a respectable score beating the Galaxy S3 in the test suite. This explains the lag free experience of the device.
Vellamo Metal
This suite is a more serious in computational benchmark. Includes the popular Dhrystone measuring integer performance and other read write operations. It is a more close to the metal benchmark offering synthetic analysis.
Vellamo Metal benchmarks
*i.imgur.com/MY6rSuH.png
*i.imgur.com/pnN4gLK.png
*i.imgur.com/E6WfzUc.png
Details
*i.imgur.com/0iOynbm.png
*i.imgur.com/y2X8RUH.png
*i.imgur.com/MY6rSuH.png
*i.imgur.com/pnN4gLK.png
*i.imgur.com/E6WfzUc.png
Details
*i.imgur.com/0iOynbm.png
*i.imgur.com/y2X8RUH.png
Here is an overview of all three scores achieved.
*i.imgur.com/hQjsQ5h.png
The performance of the device is excellent in this range. Finally we have a device that offers an android experience, the way it’s meant to be.
Battery
Although the Mi-498 comes with a 1700mAh battery, its no slouch in this department either. Google had said earlier that the android one devices are meant to last a day easily. I can safely agree to their statements. The battery lasts exactly a day with approximately over 1 hour of calls, wifi on and decent browsing. This device delivers in battery and proves again Google’s commitment on providing quality hardware and optimizations even at this price range. There are also no heating issues with this device.
Camera
The Mi-498 comes with a decent 5MP Auto Focus snapper with an LED flash. The camera is strictly decent and has nothing home to write about. The camera needs better light source, or else the results will be noisy and grainy. In broad daylight the pictures are good enough to share in facebook or instagram. The stock camera app is straight out of nexus and provides nifty features like lens blur, Panorama and HDR toggle, really unseen in this range.
Sharing some snaps taken in daylight:
*i.imgur.com/E413w7M.jpg
*i.imgur.com/PJhszol.jpg
*i.imgur.com/Ulr78ik.jpg
*i.imgur.com/FxUO5My.jpg
*i.imgur.com/PJhszol.jpg
*i.imgur.com/Ulr78ik.jpg
*i.imgur.com/FxUO5My.jpg
The device also records full 1080p videos which is very good. A 30 sec video takes roughly 60mb space in the SD card. The video quality is again great, but again light source plays a vital role or else videos will be grainy.
The overall camera is decent in this range but not exceptional.
Verdict
Google’s android one initiative has really stirred the mainstream segment. The future is even brighter considering the names joining the initiative. The phones exude quality in most departments, if not all. The initial lot from Micromax, Karbonn and Spice offers the same and this needs to be experienced to be believed. People ignoring these phones considering their image and brand value only will be in a big loss.
The most catchy part is the two full years of updates these devices promise, including Android L which does away with the Dalvik virtual machine & offers native execution speeds which closed source platforms like IOS offer. The android one platform proves that the stock android is indeed the best experience, and will let the mainstream user base experience what flagship users (Nexus)have been experiencing the whole time. The Mi-498 has really proved itself and surpassed all of my expectations.
A respectable 8/10 score from my side, considering the seamless user experience alone.
Last edited:
BTW I haven't used a second sim yet. Will definitely let you know.
