Xolo Play T1000 Review: A budget smartphone for the game lovers?

Cue in Death Star music. The cheap smartphone Davids are on the march against the Goliath’s in a specwar. Leading the forefront is Micromax, Spice, Xolo and other Indian players with some impressive phones at affordable prices. The Xolo Play T1000 brings an Nvidia powered Gatling gun of a smartphone to the war with the hope of bringing high end gaming to the Indian masses at a killer price tag. Dan dan dandan dan dan dendan dan dan…

What Is It?

Not to be confused with the killer liquid metal robot from Terminator 2, the Xolo Play T1000 is a gaming rich smartphone from Xolo’s Play series currently retailing at about Rs. 14,000, Rs. 13,000 in some places online if you’re lucky to spot the discounts. The heart of a T1000 is a Quad core processor and a 12-core Nvidia Tegra 3 GPU. You read that right, a 1.5 GHz quad core plus 12 GeForce cores clocked at 412MHz for gaming and an extra battery saver core. Impressive math. To push it all is 1GB of RAM and a small 4 GB internal memory as well as a 4.7 inch 720×1280 IPS One Glass Solution display. The rear camera is a 8 MP BSI sensor shooter with flash and a 2 MP front camera. The Xolo Play T1000 is running Android 4.1.1 (Jelly Bean)

Who’s It For?
Gamers. All kinds of gamers. This phone is wasted buying it for your mum or dad unless she or he is a gamer, loves games. Gamers on a budget who love big ass 3D extravaganzas to give the 12 cores a run for it’s money.

Design
The design of the Xolo Play T1000 is fairly nondescript, with virtually nothing standing out. It’s like the Agent Smith of phones. The front of the phone is simple black with no embellishments to distract from the display, which seems to love collecting your fingerprints. There’s a silver band running around it much like the Samsung’s or the iPhone 3GS. The back is a plastic matte finish. Holding the camera unit banded in aluminum. The design of the phone is not boring, just nondescript, functional, easily forgettable.

The Xolo Play T1000 has an excellent weight to it, not fluffy and light like most phones out there. A reassuring weight, with a fairly decent build quality. The back cover on the device that we got had uneven gaps in the fit. Also the back cover comes off with buttons and all, so when putting in back on you have to take explicit care to fit the button areas back on the proper sensors, to be able to function again.

Using It
The gorgeous 4.7 inch 312 IPS display is perfect for gaming, running at an even 720p making it easy for all Android games to render at a stock resolution. The viewing angles are quite good, especially for those games with accelerometer controls.
For General usage the phone performs decently, with Android sluggish at times, especially with an animated wallpaper background. For a Gaming phone however, the phone shows it’s true colors. A graphic intensive game like Real Racing 3 ran without any hitches, especially rendering the rear view mirror views without any graphical losses. Reflections, lens flares, smoke, dust, debris all rendered by the Tegra 3 without breaking a sweat. Textures look crisp and clear mostly due also to the 312 pixels per inch.

The Best Part
Gaming on a budget. While most phones out there try and be jack of all specs and masters of none, the Xolo Play T1000 sets out to give you a perfect gaming phone and it does just that at a great price. Rs. 14,000 for a phone that plays everything the Android app store throws at it. The display too is fantastic, with Nvidia’s Prism tech saturating colors perfectly.

Tragic Flaw
For a phone this hard”core” one would expect the speed to be through the roof. Except that the OS is pretty sluggish, which should not be the case. While the gaming part is smooth thankfully, the benchmarks are not stellar, the AnTuTu score was 12465, which was just a little under the Micromax Canvas 4 and a bit over the first Note and Desire HD. The benchmarks were similar with the 3D Mark IceStorm. Xolo and Nvidia need to address this, perhaps future patches will bring better written drivers for the device.

Test Notes
– The 8 Megapixel camera with the BSI sensor is quite good, pictures look excellent using the IPS display with the Tegra 3 making the colors really pop. Though the pictures in low light lacked a sharpness and there was still blur and a bit of noise. Though in ideal sunny conditions, the camera does not disappoint.
– The 2000 mAh Li-Ion battery gives about 5-6 hours with normal usage and a lot of gaming thrown in.
– The internal memory situation is pretty sad, at 4 GB, with about a 1.2 GB of that saved for Android, leaving you very little. Not only that the MicroSD is not hot swappable and if you have to get that card in there, you have to re-remove the annoying back cover again, which is a pain.
– While the build quality is solid, the phone does not look like it would withstand a lot of drops, so be careful.

Xolo Play T1000 Specs:
Single SIM GSM
Android 4.1 Jelly Bean
12-core NVIDIA GeForce GPU
Full HD 1080p Video Recording and Playback
NVIDIA Direct Touch
1.5 GHz NVIDIA Tegra Quad-Core with a 5th Battery-saver Core
4.7-inch HD IPS OGS Display
NVIDIA Tegra Zone for Gaming
NVIDIA PRISM Display Technology
8 MP Rear & 2 MP Front Camera
3G
Wi-Fi
GPRS
Bluetooth