Xolo ERA 3 Review: A decent and balanced selfie smartphone

The market is flooded with smartphones ranging from 3K to 1L, but most of the consumers are looking for budget phone (8-15k). Leading manufacturers to bring new phones in the category every now and then. Xolo tried to grab consumer attention by bringing device at the low price yet packed with loads of features. Especially a low-budget smartphone targeting selfie lovers with moonlight flash at the front.

The Xolo ERA 3 mobile supports 4G connectivity on both SIM slots. Enabling users to get the freedom to get fast internet access from any of the SIM. The phone is available in slate black color and gets the elegant design. The front is quite flat with a 5-inch screen and three capacitive buttons below it. On the top of the screen, an 8-MP camera is embedded with moonlight LED flash. Though the features are quite exciting when compare to price, but are they really worth to have, let’s find out…

Elegant design

Era 3 has an elegant overall design with flat front and curved back. You can remove the rear cover to get access to SIM slots and microSD port. Also, it has 2500 mAh removable battery. The rear gets sand finish which feels quite luxurious.

The 5-inch screen supports 720 x 1280 Pixels resolution and produces decent colors. The viewing angles are also good, so you can enjoy video or game with your friends and family. There is no protective coating on the screen, making it magnet to fingerprints and smudges. It looks pretty decent and has balanced dimensions. It is quite comfortable to hold in one hand.

Performance

Having the low-budget you can’t expect the phone with high specifications, yet Xolo tried to maintain the balance. The phone is powered by a 2.2 GHz quad-core CPU, mali-t720 GPU, coupled with 1 GB of RAM, has 8 GB of internal storage that can be expanded up to 64GB. The phone runs on Android N and coupled with 8 MP front and 5 MP rear camera.

In the moderate usage, the phone runs smoothly without any visible performance lag. I installed various apps in it, including games like Temple Run, Angry Birds, etc. It managed all the apps easily, but when we pushed it to limits by adding some high graphics intensive games, it went down. Of course, at this price, I wasn’t expecting it to handle them, yet want to know the limit. And considering the price, it was pretty good in handling light games and apps without any performance lag.

The front 8 mp camera has moonlight flash, which makes it more useful to capture selfies in low light conditions. It is capable to capture beautiful selfies and groufies in daylight conditions. Also moonlight flash lets you capture decent quality images in dark situations, however, noise can be seen. The camera app has Face Beauty Mode to enhance your face.

The rear camera is also good, you can click quality images with natural colors in daylight conditions as well as using the flash you can capture life moments in low light. The rear camera offers several modes to capture beautiful shots easily such as Burst and Scene Mode. Using the scene mode you can customize as per your needs and capture images in various ways with perfection be it Night, Sunset, Party, Portrait, etc. Also it supports Face Detection to click brighter images using auto exposure. The image quality of both is decent enough with pretty decent color balance.

The era 3 is backed by 2500 mAh battery that can last for one day with moderate usage. Heavy usage can lead to approximate 6-7 hours of battery life. In our battery loop test, the phone was able to play video of 8 hours 33 minutes with full volume and brightness.