Videocon Krypton 3 V50JG review: An average joe

NEW DELHI: During the last few years, the budget smartphones have emerged as one of the hottest segments in the mobile market. Technology firms like Xiaomi, Coolpad, Lenovo and more have created a foothold in the Indian smartphone market because of their budget offerings. Somewhere among these smartphone brands stands Videocon, an Indian electronics company that has its own range of budget smartphones and is trying hard to give a stiff competition to others in the market.
To make a mark amongst its rivals, the company in May launched its Videocon Krypton 3 V50JG, a 4G VoLTE smartphone at Rs 10,000. We tested the budget smartphone for a few days and this is what we have to say about it in our review.
Design and Display
As compared to other metal handsets in the same price segment, the Krypton 3 V50JG bears an all plastic build. It has a removable polycarbonate back panel and a shiny strip of faux metal line running along the edges.
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On the front, you get three capacitive touch buttons below the display along with a front-facing camera with LED flash and a speaker above it. While the left side sits clean without any buttons or slots, the right side includes the volume and power buttons. A 3.5mm headphone jack is on top and a Micro-USB charging port at the bottom. The rear camera and LED flash are placed on top left corner along with a speaker at the bottom. The back panel hides the two SIM slots, a microSD card slot and a removable battery.

All in all, the Videocon Krypton 3 V50JG gives good grip because of its sharper edges. Most part of the screen is reachable with one hand. However, using plastic for a Rs 10,000 smartphone might not be the best decision as we already have handsets priced cheaper, featuring a metal unibody design and even a fingerprint sensor which again is missing from the Krypton 3 V50JG.
As for the display, the Krypton 3 V50JG sports a 5-inch HD IPS display with DragontrailX coating. Since there is a HD display, we could clearly see the difference. However, for most of the end users this might not become an issue. In bright daylight, we did struggle a bit to clearly see the reflective display, but that is expected given the nature of IPS displays. The colour balance and saturation levels are impressive. Viewing the display from different angles are also not an issue here.
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Performance and Camera
On the performance part, the Videocon Krypton 3 V50JG was just about average. It could handle multiple applications at a time but did stutter a few times. It is worth noting here that the smartphone is powered by a 1.3GHz quad core MediaTek processor and is clubbed with 2GB RAM.

Customers might find the user interface of the smartphone very basic as it is running near stock Android 6.0 Marshmallow out-of-the-box. The UI is pretty straightforward and unlike some other smartphones out there does not feature duplicate apps. Talking about apps, we noticed that although it is running the Android 6.0 Marshmallow, the app icons remain the same what we saw in Android KitKat.
On the storage front, users would be receiving almost 11GB out of the 16GB inbuilt storage. This too should not prove to be a hassle as the Krypton 3 V50JG supports microSD card up to 64GB.
The smartphone’s 13MP rear camera was impressive, taking into account its price. The handset captured fine images like it should. Videocon, however, could’ve put in a little more effort in the camera UI as this too is not the new Google camera app you receive in Nexus handsets but an old UI, which shows most of the icons on the display, blocking the frame.
The camera UI features several modes like HDR, Gesture shots, Panorama and more. You can also swipe up on the screen to view live filters. The 5MP front-facing camera also performed fine along with the LED flash. Although the images taken in artificial and low light were not much impressive, it might work for most of the users.
The Krypton 3 V50JG’s 3000mAh battery lasted just about a day before putting back on charge. This was after we surfed the web on Wi-fi almost all the time, played some games, and streamed music. Videocon says the smartphone to come with 20% faster charging tech along with some ‘power saving technologies’.

Verdict
The Videocon Krypton 3 V50 JG is a mixed bag. The Rs 10,000 smartphone has a decent display, average processor and a fine camera, however, its processing power is not impressive and the battery too lasted for little less than a day. Two other big misses are fingerprint sensor and metal build. The Videocon Krypton 3 V50JG is a good handset to buy if its price was slightly less, around Rs 7,000.