InnJoo One Review:
Less than a year ago, InnJoo, a Dubai based mobile phone manufacturer began a massive disruption in the smartphone industry in Nigeria with the introduction of the InnJoo i1s which came at a ridiculous price tag of N14,000. Then later there was the i2 and a few others which were silently released into the market.
Less than a year down the line, at a time where the budget smartphone ecosystem in Nigeria has become very competitive, InnJoo took a giant leap and introduced a flagship device into the Nigerian market: the InnJoo One.
The InnJoo One is a 5 Inch Dual SIM (Micro & Nano) phone with premium design, in fact if you have to compare the i1s, i2 with the InnJoo One, you will find out that the company has made a huge advancement in their product line up, a feat that took some companies several years and series experimentation to achieve.
DESIGN
The InnJoo One is an elegantly built smartphone, it won’t be an understatement to say that the company spent most of the manufacturing time working the design. You would just love to hold this device in your hand. It is light weight at 123g and 6.9mm thin (although not the thinnest in the market).
The phone has an entirely new design, gentle curves around the edges and a beautifully crafted metallic frame that wraps round the phone giving it this premium look and makes it design competitive with some high end devices.
To the right of the phone are the volume button and the power button while on the left you find the Dual SIM card trays which can be opened with the use of a tiny pin. The dual SIM feature enables you use both a Micro SIM and a Nano SIM at the same time. The Nano SIM slot also serves as the microSD card slot so you either use the Dual SIM without a memory expansion or you settle for a single SIM with far more memory. At the back you have the 13MP camera, a flash, loud speaker just below and the brand name inscribed boldly a little above the centre. At the top and below are the head phone jack and USB/charging port respectively.
There is a double sided Dragontrail glass covering both the 5-inch display and the back of the phone. Dragontrail is a kind of glass used in the Sony Expera Z that allows for thinness without fragility, strength and scratch resistance. The navigation keys are just below the screen and the front camera is placed right above.
DISPLAY
The InnJoo One comes with a 5-inch IPS display screen with a screen resolution of 1280 x 720 pixels. The display is good and delivers a clear, sharp and bright viewing capabilities. The display delivers HD viewing for movies and other multimedia experience. Viewing angles is also very impressive.
CAMERA
There is a 13MPauto-focus camera with flash at the back of the phone, the flash is just below the camera. The camera takes decent (although not too detail) pictures during the day with abundant light. Pictures taken under low light looks noisy and less sharp. The 8MP front camera also does reasonably well under abundant light, takes large pictures up to 3264 x 2448 pixel. You do not get Optical Image Stabilization (OIS) so you need to ensure your camera is stable before taking a picture.
Apart from the regular Android camera features like HDR Mode, beauty face mode, face detection, smile shot, voice capture, there is a striking feature called ‘Auto Scene detection’. Activating this feature automatically adjusts the camera scene modes to night, sunset, sport, theatre….without having to do it manually.
SOFTWARE, FEATURES & PERFORMANCE
The InnJoo One runs on the Android 4.4.2 KitKat OS and is powered by a 1.4GHz Octa-Core processor. This enables apps open fast and web pages load easily. InnJoo bundled the device with its customized user interphase (UI) apps and services. The UI is the InnUI, an InnStore where you have thousands of apps to download and even the InnCloud for cloud storage. Pre-installed app include the Jumia app, Google apps like Search, Youtube, Google+, Gmail.
One disturbing thing I found out was that you find it difficult to uninstall some apps. For example the Pre-installed YouTube app on the phone is an old version which I could not uninstall nor even update….. Arrgghhh, I am just stuck with the material design of the old app.
The customized UI gives you room to customize the launcher by adjusting or changing its font or swipe effect. There is no app tray so you get all your apps on separate windows by just swiping either left or right (similar to what is obtainable on the iPhone)
You will enjoy playing both 2D and 3 games on this device as it has a high support for 2D and 3D graphics. Proximity sensor also works fine as well as perform a ‘tap to wake’ feature that turns on the screen from sleep mode by double tapping the screen twice. This feature is not activated by default, you gave to go into the settings menu to activate it if you intend to use it.
There is also a tiny notification light above the screen that blinks to notify you of missed calls, emails and messages. This light also lights up as an indicator when the phone is charging.
One quick observation is the fact that the headphone jack is not compatible with other earphones. Also the highest volume when playing music on both the loud speaker and using the earphone isn’t loud enough, although this is relative because I sampled a few people and some of them say the volume is ok…
I also noticed that the screen holds on to finger prints and I had to continuously clean/wipe out finger prints on the screen.
MEMORY
Internal memory of the InnJoo One is 16GB and is expandable with the use of a memory card. RAM size clocks at 2GB which allows for easy multitasking.
BATTERY
Battery is not removable and its capacity is 2600mAh. Battery life is a lot impressive, I was on WiFi and on 100% screen brightness with average use and still got about 10 hours of run time. For a heavy user, you are likely to get less, say between 7-8 hours.
To wrap it up, if you are not the kind of person that loves too much paparazzi on your phone but the basic everyday smartphone functionality, then the InnJoo One is a good option.
With such an impressive design and material build quality, fast 8-core processors it is surprising to know that the phone will be sold for N27, 999. The company in partnership with Jumia.com.ng continues to adopt the internet business model which cuts off the middle men and other associated cost to deliver the phone directly to the final consumer at an affordable price.
You can Pre-Order the InnJoo One on Jumia.com.ng began on 12th February and will officially go on sale on 23rd February.
See video review below:
