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Panasonic Eluga Ray 700 Review : Betting on the Big battery

Lakshmi Rajan

Panasonic is quiet bullish about Indian market and is evident by its new launches catering to varied needs and use cases of Indian consumers. Few weeks back I had reviewed the Panasonic A3 Pro, which we announced it as the Japanese homecoming and now we have here the Eluga Ray 700 which looks like a potent device considering the fact it has a 5000mAh mammoth battery pack as its USP. Go ahead, read the Eluga Ray 700 review to see if it can win over the market. Out of the box you get:

Design and Build Quality

While most phones are getting thinner these days, thinner also comes with an added risk of being less durable. Panasonic seems to be stressing more upon the durability factor in their phones, so yes their phones are bit fatter but I have dropped them couple of times and they withstood the falls without any visible marks. It comes in three colors – champagne gold, mocha gold and marine blue. While the blue color looked a hottie in the box cover, what I got though is the champagne gold unit for review. Clad in a metal unibody the Eluga Ray 700 measures 8.9mm and weighs 182 grams. The weight distribution is even, you actually don’t feel it hefty. Like in A3 Pro, there is a chrome gleam running at the edges of both the front and back. The camera module and the LED flash is encased in a single module and it adds character to the design. The top settles for a audio port. The bottom has the microUSB port and speaker grille(s) , while one side houses the speaker grille, the another balances the design and also accommodates a microphone. The right side has the power button and volume buttons, both are easily accessible on one hand and offers good tactile feedback. The left side has the SIM tray and gladly its not a hybrid SIM type. You can have two SIMs and also slot in a microSD card. Its a 4G VoLTE phone. The front has a capacitive buttons flanked by back and menu buttons. If you prefer you can opt for on-screen navigation buttons from the settings menu. Pretty neat choice here. The top has the front camera ,ear piece grille and sensors.

Display

The Eluga Ray 700 has a 5.5-inch IPS LCD screen with a 1920 x 1080 pixes resolution, adding up to a PPI pixel density. It is backed by a Corning Gorilla Glass 3 protection and has a 2.5D glass. The display settings has the MiraVision settings for tuning the basic colors, changing around the color modes and tuning the sharpness and color temperature, in case you want to match the display quality to your liking. There is an adaptive brightness toggle, screen cast option. There is also a launcher app sort setting where you can choose to arrange the apps alphabetically , which is the default option or by recently installed sorting.

Software

While most OEMs have a affinity for introducing their own UI and tweaking the Android heavily, Panasonic has opted for almost a stock android experience but with minor tweaks.  You get app drawer too. The phone doesn’t offer much feature-wise unlike the heavily skimmed most other UIs. You do get a navigation bar setting where you can shift the position of the back and menu buttons. Since it runs on Android Nougat, Eluga Ray 700 also supports multi-tasking with its split screen feature. The UI could do a bit of fine tuning and made sleeker though.

Performance

The Eluga Ray 700 is powered by MediaTek MT6753 chipset with an octa-core processor clocked at 1.3GHz , Mali T720MP3, 3GB of RAM and 32GB of storage with around 22.6GB user available out of the box. It is same as the A3 Pro. The phone comes with lot many pre-installed apps and some are Indian specific like Amazon Prime, PhonePe, V-PayQuik and other apps like Xender, K-Gallery, Cupcake Dreamland. The good thing is most of these apps can be uninstalled if you want to. The phone has FM player which many in India especially the segment that buy phones offline look for. The fingerprint sensor works good and accurate when unlocking the phone though not the fastest I have seen. There is no app lock or any extra features attached to the sensor. When it comes to gaming the MT6753 handles light and most games but might struggle against graphic intensive games and you might need to shift to low-medium settings for a decent play. But this phone with a 5000mAh is not targeted at the gaming tribe either but those who want to play a bit of random games during their break may be and not bothered about their battery being drained. And of course, you can indulge on hours of movies too with those extra battery juice from the 5000mA pack. One inclusion that Panasonic tout on their phones beginning with the Eluga Ray and Ray Max is their bet on artificial intelligence, Arbo that is integrated to the software. While AI is the future the technology is leading us to, the Arbo is just a nascent concept. It gives suggestions as you keep using the phone but there is much Panasonic could bring with the advancement of the technology. As of date, the Arbo is still learning and miles to go before it works in unison with the user. Call quality is good, the speaker quality is good too. The Ray 700 also has google voice assistant baked in, so at any screen you can say “Ok Google” and call upon the google assistance.

Camera

[gallery link="file" columns="4" ids="12506,12507,12508,12509,12510,12511,12512,12513" orderby="rand"] The Eluga Ray 700 boasts of a 13-megapixel camera in the front and back both capable of up to 1080p videos. The rear camera performs decently well under good day light. The color reproduction is natural. There is no artificial sharpness and they images look soft and pleasing. Under low light, like most of the phones in this price range there are quiet some noise levels but still the colors are natural. HDR helps to highlight the shadows and you can see it in one of the images in the gallery. The 13-megapixel front camera also does a decently good job at taking selfies. While there is no image stabilization, both the cameras can take up to fullHD videos.  The camera modes is limited to HDR, Panaroma and face beauty but surprisingly the camera mode also has a RAW mode, in case you want.

Battery life:

The 5000mAh battery offered me around 9 hours 30 minutes of screen on time, which is pretty good. If you are a normal user, you can expect close to two days of battery life with this phone.

Verdict:

Panasonic seems to have got the pricing right for Eluga Ray 700 at Rs 9,999. It’s the segment where volumes are and with a 5000mAh battery and offering decent mix of everything that an average consumer would look forward to in a Smartphone, Eluga Ray 700 doesn’t disappoint.    ]]>
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