Itel S42 Review

In past couple of months, we saw several announcements from Trassion Holdings that has smartphones brands including Itel, Tecno, Infinix, Spice, and Oraimo. Recently, they introduce Itel S42 that targets budget consumers. Let's have a look, what it has to offer...

Itel S42 Review: Elegant design

The S42 has 18:9 body to screen ratio which is becoming common nowadays. Yet, the 5.65-inch screen fits easily in one hand plus 2.5D curved-edges gives it a sophisticated look. IPS screen has 720x1440 pixels resolution with 285 PPI pixel density. In the first appearance, you might get confused with rounded corners, but it’s a smart trick done with wallpaper image, just open any other app and corners will light up as usual. The screen produces vibrant colors and sharp enough to enjoy various videos and images.

The back is fairly plain with camera bump on the top left corner and sides are curved. body is made of metal with shiny brush metal paint on the top. It looks pretty cool but attracts smudges. The fingerprint sensor is easily accessible in the center.

Itel S42 Review: Decent camera

Itel S42 comes with single 13 MP camera setup at both ends – front and back with dual-LED flash. We were able to get decent shots in daylight which we can expect from a budget smartphone. Colors were good with the fair amount of details. In low light conditions, the camera struggles a bit, yet captured usable shots. From both front and rear cameras can capture 1080p video, but by default comes with the 720p setting.

As selfies are much popular, Itel is packed with flash at the front as well that makes life easier. You can capture groufies and selfies in low light conditions as well. The camera app has various options including beatification, also there's a "celebrity" makeup mode that lets you apply dramatic (and comical) transformations to faces.

Itel S42 Review: Performance

The phone is backed by Snapdragon 425 64bit 1.4 GHz Quad Core processor, 3GB of RAM, and 16GB of storage that can be expanded up to 128GB. The phone runs smoothly in moderate usage, but once you start stuffing contents and apps on it, can see hiccups in the performance. Having the Adreno 308 600MHz GPU, it is capable of handling various graphics intensive games, yet we saw performance lag while playing games like Asphalt 8.

The UI is fairly clean and simple with various features. Itle S42 supports face recognition that you can setup in setting app labeled "Biological ID". You can enroll your face plus fingerprint both, additionally it lets you enable fingerprint shortcuts for taking photos, accepting, and recording calls, and dismissing alarms.

There are some gesture controls as well for instance capture screenshots, toggling one-handed mode, and launching specific apps directly from standby by tracing gestures on the screen. It comes preinstalled apps like Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, and Whatsapp, plus some more apps that we haven't heard of before. UI is clean, yet we encountered some hiccups while using the camera and some other apps including WhatsApp and Facebook.

The phone has loudspeakers that work well when enjoying music, but when on call, you might struggle as we sound get muffled a lot.

Itel S42 Review: Battery life

The phone is powered by a 3000mAh battery that delivers good battery life. In the moderate usage, its cal lasts for the entire day, with a bit of gaming and quite a lot of Web browsing and video streaming. In our video loop test, it lasts for 6 hours 48 minutes playing video over wifi with full volume and brightness.