Mobiistar, a Vietnamese smartphone maker entered highly competitive Indian market last year. The company started its journey as an online brand with Flipkart as its facilitating partner but switched to an offline-centric approach soon after. The latest Mobiistar X1 Notch that we recently got hold of is meant to serve as an offline alternative. We have been living with the X1 Notch for a few weeks now and have summed up our opinions below.
Mobiistar X1 Notch Look and Feel
In 2018, smartphone notches became a sort of phenomena. Almost all smartphone makers were intrigued by the notches including Mobiistar. The company has tried to made notch more affordable with the launch of X1 Notch which is priced under Rs 10,000. Having said that, notches are fairly customary by now and don’t bring anything special to the table.
The offline centric device hopes to lure buyers with its appealing aesthetics. It is mainly made of glossy polycarbonate material which creates an illusion of glass. Mobiistar has also introduced a color-shift gradient that reflects light falling at an angle. This is again something that’s in trend, even when it’s a bit flashy.
Like all glass back phones, it also attracts smudges. The rear panel also houses a fingerprint sensor and a primary camera with flash.
The front of the phone is dominated by a 19:9 notch screen with sizable chin and a wide notch. It’s a 5.7-inch panel that supports HD+ resolution and wears a 2.5D curved glass on top. Display colors, contrasts, and brightness felt optimum in time with the device.
As far as other design aspects are concerned, the phone features regular buttons placement with a volume rocker and power button finding a spot on the right edge and triple slot tray for dual SIMs and microSD card on the left edge. Mobiistar has placed a 3.5mm audio jack at the top and a regular micro-USB port at the bottom edge. Also, the mono speaker finds a place at the bottom edge.
Hardware and software
Moving on the hardware part, the Mobiistar X1 Notch is powered by MediaTek Helio A22 chipset which is clubbed with PowerVR GPU. The phone comes in two memory combinations : 2GB + 16GB and 3GB + 32GB. Out of these two, the 32GB variant landed in our office which has about 22GB free storage available for use. On the software front, the phone runs custom Android 8.1 Oreo.
The X1 Notch software has features like face unlock, DuraSpeed, gestures support, and a few other. A number of bloatware apps come pre-installed on the phone, but the good thing is users can uninstall them.
As for the performance, we didn’t encounter any jitteriness or freezing fresh out of the box. The app load time was decent. We will of course reserve our verdict till we have extensively tested the X1 Notch in our space.
Camera and Battery
Mobiistar, ever since its entry in the Indian market, has been betting big on selfies, and the strategy hasn’t changed with the X1 Notch. The phone comes with 13-megapixel cameras, both on front and rear. The company claims to have used AI technology to ensure that the camera detects scene and beautifies images accordingly.
The camera app also includes other important features like HDR mode, Night mode, live filters, and few others. We didn’t get much of an opportunity to test the camera but we did manage to click a couple of daylight shots that turned out well. Still, it is too early to draw conclusions, so we once again reserve our call until full review.
Mobiistar X1 Notch First impressions
The Mobiistar X1 Notch is perhaps on the right track focusing more on the offline market. The competition in the online realm where big honchos are bleeding themselves at razor-thin margins doesn’t leave much of a scope for a new entrant.
The phone seems to be targeted towards the budget buyers in tier-2 and tier-3 cities who are more comfortable with trying and buying phones at offline stores. What works in the favor of the Mobiistar X1 Notch is its vibrant aesthetics, notch screen, and selfie-focused approach.
