Coolpad Note 3 Lite Review

Coolpad Note 3 Lite is first Make In India smartphone from Coolpad and will be manufactured in association with Videocon at Auragabad facility. It is younger sibling of the 5.5-inch Coolpad Note 3 smartphone. The only major difference being in processing power. The bigger Note 3 runs on 64-bit 1.3GHz octa-core MediaTek MT6753 CPU, while the 5-inch Lite version runs on a 64 bit 1GHz quad-core MT 6735 processor with 3GB RAM.

Design and features

The smartphone comes in white color with a strip of golden finish all around including and also on the outer rim of camera. The Coolpad Note 3 Lite features a fingerprint sensor with the same Golden finish, located at the back of the phone and supports 360 degrees finger rotation capability, fast response time and has 165 degree curved form factor for easy single hand usage. The back of the device has Anti-slip texture finish to avoid accidental slips from the hand.

The Coolpad UI 6.0 running on Android Lollipop has neat interface. You can switch from traditional layout to an app drawer layout with just a single tap under the settings tab.

The left side housed the a single bar for controlling the volume and right side includes the power on button. Both the buttons are easily reachable when holding the phone in portrait mode and offer good feedback. The back is removable but the battery is not and includes space for SIM slots and micro- SD card.

At the bottom of the screen you will find three capacitive touch screen buttons for back, menu and recent apps.

The smartphone does not comes with any screen protection like Gorilla Glass display or any other protective coating. The Lenovo Vibe P1m which is 1000 bucks higher packs Gorilla Glass and Splash proof coating that gives an added protection to the screen and protects the phone from accidental spills.

You can also customize the camera for fast capture by using the Fingerprint sensor. The device also has the capability to open different apps with different fingerprint stored, Coolpad calls it Apps on Fingerprint.

Performance

The 5 inch HD IPS panel offers good colors, contrast ratios. The In-Plane Switching technology delivers good color reproduction and wide viewing angles. However the outdoor visibility is low.

Apps open up quickly. There is slight hiccup in opening some apps but that can be forgiven considering the price. Even in high end games like Asphalt 8 it processed everything wonderfully.

The CoolPad Note 3 Lite runs on Android Lollipop 5.1 with Coolpad UI 6.0 as of now but will be updated to Android Marshmallow in the near future. The Coolpad UI 6.0 is clean and it does pack some interesting customizations. Just enable the C button from the drop down menu and a small C appears on the screen. Tapping the C will surface a small circular window that gives you quick access to back, home, mute, restart, power off an even allows you to capture a screen shot directly. You can move the C anywhere as you like onto the screen and the menu automatically hides after 15 seconds. Enabling multitask from the same drop down menu gives you another vertical screen wherein you can put apps that you frequent use and certainly comes out as a handy feature.

The finger print scanner works brilliantly and unlocks the device in less than 0.5 seconds. Yes you read it right it is that fast. Just touch and its unlocked. We also set-up biometric protection for few apps and it won't open unless you provide a fingerprint, that's added security to your apps. You can set-up this feature for upto five apps.

The 13MP rear shooter is great for capturing in bright sunlight, has good shutter speed like Note 3 and also works well under low light conditions as compared to Lenovo Vibe P1m low light shoots. The 5MP front  camera is good for selfie lovers and clicks good pictures.  We found the camera app easy to use and offers modes like face beauty, HDR, panorama etc and even allows you to edit the picture and add various effects. In addition to this you can also configure the finger print sensor to click a picture. The volume down control can be used to take a picture when screen is turned off. We tried both these settings and it worked like a charm clicking pictures within seconds.

The 2500mAH battery lasted for almost a day and did not go beyond that on normal usage that for me includes web browsing, social media apps and at times watching videos over YouTube. In our video loop test it lasted for 4 hr 10 minutes.