Notwithstanding the cut-throat competition from the Chinese OEMs, InFocus is consistently launching new devices in the Indian market. Along the way, they are also steadily increasing their footprints in the offline market and considerable retail presence. The Bingo lineup from InFocus is an affordable series of Android Smartphones and the most affordable of the product lineup is the Bingo 10, which we got here. Priced at Rs 4,200, roughly around US $ 65, it is aimed at the mass segment and it’s 4.5-inch compact body is for those who feel the popular 5 and above display size too big to fit into their palms and pocket. Affordable yes, but how does it perform? I uncover it all in this review.
There are two things interesting compact phone with compact pricing.
One, it features a LED flash at the front, so you hope to get a better selfies in not-so-good lighting.
Two, it runs on Android 6.0 Marshmallow out of the box. InFocus claims it is the most affordable device with the M.
Now the design part. The casing is poly-carbonate. The rear houses a 5MP camera, LED flash, InFocus branding in the middle and a speaker grille at the bottom.
The sides gets an interesting visual treatment. The phone is dual-color, with a green color band running the sides of the white device. There is also a black variant with a blue border. The green on white looks cool, a bit youth-centric. The banding is not smooth but has diagonal cuts all through enhancing the look. The right side has the power button on top with the volume rocker a little below it.
The 3.5mm audio jack and the microUSB port is placed on the top.
A single microphone is at the middle of the bottom side.
The back panel is removable and it houses a 2000mAh battery and dual-SIM slots. It also has an option for microSD card slot to accommodate up to 64GB.
Display
The 4.5-inch display is on a warmer side. It has a 480 x 854 pixels resolution with a 217 pixels per inch. The compact display makes the low resolution decent to live with. On the display settings, there is a bluefilter toggle and a color temperature presets, though natural and warm had smallest difference between them. The display comes pre-laid with a screen guard. The display suffers from poor contrast ration and so when you play games like Dead Trigger 2 which has lots low light or watch movies with low light effects, the dynamic range suffers resulting in poorer viewing experience.Viewing angles are not great either.
Software
While even bigger brands struggle to ship some of the better devices with Android Marshmallow version, it is good to have a entry-level affordable device like Bingo 10 running on it.
While InFocus dials M for Bingo 10, it is not the stock Android experience but they have added their own layer on top of it. Long pressing the home screen takes you to the screen where you can access widgets, apps, wallpapers, preferences and task manager. There is also a theme section with couple of themes and a download icon at the theme store takes you to a theme section in Play store.
Long pressing the home button pulls the Google Now and is contextual based now because of the Android M, so it reads the keywords of the screen you are and gives relevant suggestions.
There are few motion features thrown in like turn over the device to reject call or shake for next song and you also get other features like App permissions etc. There are couple of pre-installed apps for memory management.
I have done a separate video on the features list of the InFocus Bingo 10, you can take a look at it for more.
https://youtu.be/uoWDRRQddgs
Hardware and Performance
The Bingo 10 makes use of MediaTek chipset MT6580M, a quad-core processor clocked at 1.3GHz and paired with a 1GB of RAM and Andreno 400M GPU. It has a 8GB of internal storage but barely 2.7GB is user available. So an microSD card is a must if you intend to have some apps, music and movies in your device. So how does the device perform? The gaming was better than my expectations. Of course the modest specs might struggle with the high-end graphics games like Asphalt 8 but it did cope up well with games like Dead Trigger 2 and casual games like Subway surfers and Hill Climb Racing are very playable. The low dynamic range of the screen though comes as a bummer. It handled decently well the regular tasks like browsing, YouTube playback etc, though a bit of lag can be felt here but nothing to complaint about considering the entry-level nature of the device. It handles well the calls and the audio quality is good. The loud speaker is decent to live with at this price.Camera
For the starters, the InFocus Bingo 10 comes with a 5MP camera at the rear and front and also a LED flash on both the sides. How does the camera deliver? The rear camera comes with fixed focus, so you can’t lock the focus on a particular object. Up close pictures suffers from lack of focus. The camera app is fundamental with face beauty and panorama mode along with HDR mode to play with. The features list on the camera app include face detection, gesture shot, burst shots up to 40 images, smile shot and timer. It can take videos on 720p. Being an entry level budget Smartphone, the camera is pretty basic. The pictures are passable and you need to pick and choose the good ones.
Now the LED on the front. Does it help? A bit yes, if you want to throw some light on a poorly-lit conditions but the light is not very effective though but does throw a big of white on your face. You can check the sample below. The left picture is without the flash at a poorly lit condition and the right with the flash turned on.
