The competition amongst homegrown mobile phone manufacturers seem to be touching new heights everyday. Not long ago, Micromax came up with an upgrade to its Canvas HD and called it the Canvas 4. Fellow competitor Xolo last week came up with the Q1000s which trumps the Canvas 4 in terms of the hardware with it being only slightly more expensive. Now another homegrown company has upped the ante even further. Say hello to the Intex Aqua i7 – the newest flagship Android handset from Intex.
The Intex Aqua i7 features a 5 inch full HD display that endows it a very impressive PPI density of 441. While it is not the first phone from a homegrown manufacturer to feature a full HD display, the rest of the features on the Aqua i7 are impressive too.
It is powered by the Mediatek MT 6589T chipset – the same as the one used on the Xolo Q1000s. The Canvas 4 in comparison uses a slightly underclocked “stock” version of the same chip which has a slower CPU and GPU. The phone gets 32 GB of internal memory which you cannot expand further and it runs Android 4.2 at launch. Unlike most others in this segment which ship with 1 GB of RAM, this one gets a colossal 2 GB of RAM!
The main camera can take 13 megapixel shots and record videos in full HD. The front camera can also be used for imaging and boasts a resolution of 5 megapixels. As expected, this one is a dual SIM handset and one of the SIM slots support 3G. Powering all this is a battery rated at 2000 mAH.
Apart from all these “normal” stuff, Intex has also added in a customized software bundle with applications tailor made for us Indians – chief amongst this being something known as the Matrabhasha. As the name suggests, this one is basically a language pack that will let you type away on the phone in local Indian languages. Intex also offers 5 GB of space with their Intex Cloud service for storing your data on their servers.
The Aqua i7 has been launched at a price of Rs. 21,900 and would be available in stores starting September 9, 2013. It would be available in two color options: Black and White.
It would be interesting to see how the markets responds to a product from an Indian manufacturer with a price tag of more than Rs. 20,000 – although we have seen Xolo launch some of its Intel powered devices with a 20k plus price tag.
