Mobiistar XQ Dual Review – Surprisingly Good

Talking about budget segment smartphones we really don’t do a lot of talking, but the recent launched Mobiistar XQ Dual sets it apart. We have been testing this device from a while & we really started thinking if this new Smartphone brand can lead the budget segment smartphone category or not. This smartphone is priced at INR 7,999 & to decide if it’s worth buying the Mobiistar XQ Dual, here is the complete review so that you can make our decision.

Pros	Cons
Featured phone as compare to the Budget	The UI needs improvement
Amazing wide angle camera	Poor Audio Quality
Good Built Quality	Less Camera Modes
Good Battery Life	Slow fingerprint scanner

Under The Box:

The box comes with simple packaging & under the hood the device comes loaded with the following materials.

• Smartphone
• Silicon Case
• SIM Injecting Tool
• Power Adapter
• Power Cable
• User Manuals

One thing that was missing is the headphone, but considering the price point we can ignore this fact.

Design & Built:

Compared to the price, the MobiiStar XQ Dual comes with a very decent built quality, having a metal body on the back, which can easily take few drops. On the back side of the phone contains the fingerprint scanner and just above that is the single 13MP camera. On the right hand sides the phone contains a lock/power button along with a SIM Card slot just above that and on the left hand side it comes with the volume rocker.

This budget segment smartphone is majorly focused on the self side & hence it has a dual selfie camera with 13+8MP camera sensor with LED flash. What’s impressive here is that the brand is trying to give a budget segment smartphone quite a decent look. The phone has a golden plate separate for the antenna, which does add some value to the looks.

Looking at the overall built quality of the smartphone, it surly looks like a mid ranged smartphone, but surprisingly MobiiStar is providing quite a good build quality & this is purely with a thought to make this phone look quite premium as compare to the price.

Performance: 

Before we talk about the performance in detail, let me clear few things. First the performance on this measured depending not only on the budget, but also as compared to the other competitors in the same price point. We will break the performance part in different segment so that it becomes easy for you guys to understand it.

Battery Performance:

The battery of the smartphone lasts really good, but the charging time is what disappointing here. As every other smartphones are giving fast charging, the MobiiStar takes around 2 hours 15 minutes to charge your device from 0% to 100%. But remember the smartphones that comes in the same price point has the same issue.

During our battery test, the smartphone easily lasts for over 9 hours with usual calls, music playback and also during the gaming. The smartphone is armed with 3000mAh battery and that is what surprising for me to understand how can a smartphone with 3000mAh battery could last for 9 hours.

Camera Performance: 

One of the most important things in any smartphone these days is the camera. This smartphone being a selfie oriented camera phone we will first see the front camera & then the rear camera sample test.

• Selfie Camera Test:

This smartphone being a selfie oriented smartphone the 13+8MP does a pretty good job, but if you are thinking of getting an extra ordinary, clear, pixel free, gradient free selfie, then think again; it’s a budget segment smartphone. I really liked how wide the camera lens can go. The MobiiStar is till now one of the best budgeting selfie smartphones we have tested yet.

Talking about the front video recording, i would say that they have managed it really well. The front camera records 1080p  video, which is quite good for the budgeting smartphone. But, what’s not good about the front recording is the audio capture quality. They don’t have the high quality audio recording. I really don’t think that can be fixed on a software update.

• Rear Camera: 

Now this is one part which i think everyone would like to know about. I have taken this smartphone through a lot of camera tests to give justice to those people who really want to know the camera performance of the XQ Dual. To be frank, the smartphone has a very decent picture capture quality. The camera misses capturing the details, which is one down side of the camera. It also does not have an OIS which again is another disappointing point in this smartphone

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Also comparing the smartphone with others brands in the same price point; The XQ Dual do perform better. The biggest competitor for this brand is the Moto G5 (Price around INR 8,900), which does has a better camera performance than the XQ Dual.

There are one thing which I really liked & Dislike about the camera UI:

Like: It is really hard to find a budget segment smartphone to have a manual mode that can give you a real time video when you change the manual settings.

Dislike: The one thing i really want MobiiStar to work on is the modes view. People really like the camera modes to me easily identified. But the case with the MobiiStar is different. We do believe that in few updates they will manage to re design their Camera UI.

Hardware Performance: 

Now we come to the part, which matters the most in the smartphone and that is the hardware performance. The Smartphone comes with a Snapdragon 430 SOC & 3GB RAM. We haven’t done any benchmark test in this device, as what matters in this price segment smartphone is the real time performance.

The smartphone is not super fact, but can manage to do moderate task. You really can’t think of playing high end games in this smartphone, but playing moderate games can be done. The smartphone does consumes battery faster during gaming. At our test the smartphone did dropped 30% battery in just an hour of gaming. But this is quite common on all the smartphones apart from the Zenfone Max Pro M1 we have tested.

Overall the smartphone does a pretty good job in managing the daily task. I did not find that major drawback in the performance.

Software: 

I feel like everyone are planning to go for iPhone. The XQDual UI has some icon that looks similar to the older iPhone models. Apart from few icons you can easily get used to the UI of this smartphone.

Currently the Smartphone comes loaded with Android 7.1.2 and one of the best part is that the smartphone can be upgraded to Android Oreo (As confirmed by the spokes person) by this year ends.

There is still more room for the improvement on their UI, which is really think can be achieved as by the time passes, but as of now the UI of this smartphone looks cheap, which surly need to be improved. Currently the UI version of this Smartphone is 3.0 and I believe that by Version 4.0 we could see much better improvement on the smartphone.

Verdict: 

Coming to the final and the most important part of this review is the verdict. So should we buy this smartphone? The answer is yes. If you are looking for a budget segment smartphone under 10k and want it to be feature then this is one of the best option for you. You still have the Real Me 3GB RAM & 32 GB ROM variant, which will cost you round 8,000 INR.