E-tel  mobile phones by Brantel Lanka Pvt Ltd has opened the doors to a new era of smart phones with the company’s latest introduction, The Curiosity i7.  a 5 inch Android smart phone for a very affordable and  unbelievable price.

The Curiosity i7 is powered by a 1 GHz Cortex A9 dual core ARM based processor and a 512MB RAM that could store data in the 2.5GB internal storage of the phone or external memory with a MicroSD card.

The manufacturers had been witty to install the Android 4.0.4 Ice Cream Sandwich to the i7 and it comes with an App bundle containing Skype, Opera Mini, Maps and a decent File manager. During out tests, aps like Skype and Viber worked seamlessly and we managed to have a good browsing speed most of the time. The resolution of the screen might be a little less compared to the size of it but it seems to be the secret behind the seamless functionality of the phone where the processor doesn’t have to worry about too much graphics processing.

When it comes to 5 inch displays in the smart phone world, the very mention of the word can be rather expensive because you might not be able to buy a smartphone with a 5 inch display within a price range of Rs.80,000 to 100,000/=. A lot of mobile phone users love to use a cool smartphone with a 5 incher but most of the time, the price prevents them from having that luxury.  The Curiosity i7 retails for just Rs.22,900/= and that is rather a comfortable and considerable price for a 5 incher considering the features it gives. We can finally say that if you are a person who is looking for a 5 inch Android smartphone, the Curiosity i7 would be a device which gives you a decent performance packed with maximum customer satisfaction.

The first look at the Curiosity i7 gives you a feeling of high-tech and rather superior nature. The device is manufactured within the dimensions of 143x77x10.5mm and it weighs a little bulk of 205g. The whole front surface is covered with the 5 inch capacitive touchscreen which holds a resolution rate of 480x800 and a pixel per inch(ppi) rate close to 241ppi. There are no physical buttons on the front surface of the phone because all three Android control buttons are manufactured as backlit capacitive touch sensors. The phone has a metallic chrome rim separating the front and the back giving it a rich look. The volume controllers and the power on/off and lock buttons are located on the upper right hand edge of the phone. We hoped to see a dedicated camera button but none was equipped in the Curiosity i7.
We failed to discover any glitch or malfunction in any of the widgets, menus or submenus. We also tried a few games like Angry Birds Space, Vector and Temple Run 2 on the Curiosity i7 and found out that all of them were running perfectly without any slowing effect. It’s true that the display didn’t give out an outstanding graphical feedback but a lot of similar devices in the market had some trouble in running at least one of the above mentioned apps seamlessly.

The Curiosity i7 houses a 2500mAh battery which can keep the device alive for a talk time of 4 hours and a standby time of 350 hours. You will get the stereo headset enhancement, the micro USB data cable+ the charger and an extra back cover with an attached leather display cover. This leather cover has a special feature that automatically locks the screen once you fold the cover over the screen.

The Curiosity i7 is equipped with all the major connectivity aspects such as Bluetooth, WiFi and WiFi Hotspot. This dual camera device has a front cam of 0.3 Megapixels and has an LED flash supported main/back Camera with a vision power of decent 5 Megapixels. When it comes to Skype video calls, the front cam works nicely but we saw a small problem in the loudness of the speaker. The camera comes with the popular features such as Video, Panorama and Multi-shots with a handy Auto Scene Detection Mode. The camera is powerful enough to capture images with a resolution of 2560x1920. The image quality is good in daytime and it captured still and moving objects perfectly. In dark situations, the LED flash gave a good support to fill the light but it was only good for still close-ups.

When it comes to mobile phones, it is a common known fact that there isn’t any perfect device in the marked. The perfection depends on having a little number of cons and tons of pros.