Review: Coolpad Dazen 1 – It has too much to offer at Rs. 5,999

Coolpad, a relatively new smartphone brand in India, debuted in Indian market last month with Dazen 1 and Dazen X7 smartphones. In China, Coolpad is serving for over 20 years and it is the third largest smartphone company.

The company launched its budget smartphone, Coolpad Dazen 1 in India for Rs. 6,999. Earlier this month, the smartphone went on sale in India and soon after the first flash sale the company reduced its price to Rs. 5,999.

We have been using the device for over two weeks and tested it rigorously. So let’s take a look how Coolpad Dazen 1 performes:

Box Contents:

The box contents are pretty normal, in the box you get a Headset, a Battery, a USB cable, Manual, and a Charger. It doesn’t come with a headphone.

Design:

Coolpad Dazen 1 has plastic body. There is a power/lock button on the right side, a 3.5mm audio jack on the top side, Volume rocker on the left side and a USB port on the bottom side. It comes with a removable battery. There are two micro sim card slot and a MicroSD card slot.

Sometimes dust settles on the plastic back near the camera and near the speaker cutout. As you can see in the image above, the dust particles looks bad an its hard to remove the dust particles.

Display:

Dazen 1 sports a 5 inch HD screen which translates to 1280 x 720 resolution. The display is crisp and offers good viewing angles. The big screen is good for watching movies and playing games. Indoor screen visibility is good but the screen does not perform well under the direct sunlight. Sometimes you need to struggle to view the screen under sunlight. The auto brightness feature adjusts the brightness automatically.

Performance:

Coolpad Dazen 1 is powered by a 1.2 GHz Quad Core 64 bit Qualcomm Snapdragon 410 processor coupled with 2GB of RAM. It also comes with a Adreno 306 GPU. With 2GB RAM and 64 bit SoC, the phone does performs well and doesn’t lag. Even after opening many apps, the phone gives excellent performance.

On an average you get around 1.2GB RAM. Sometimes while playing a game for longer time you can expect minor lags. Even after excessive usage there are no heating issues.

Battery:

I am putting battery above camera because battery is one department where Dazen 1 performs great. It packs a 2,500mAh battery. The battery is big enough to last over a day. With normal usage the phone can last over one and half day.

Camera:

The smartphone comes with a 8 Megapixel front camera and a 2 Megapixel front facing shooter. The photos looks bright and colorful but the images differ too much when it comes to natural image. It captures good photos under low light. It offers several modes like Beauty, Nightshot, HDR and many other options.

Coolpad Dazen 1 also allows you to capture image with sound and allows to click GIFs. These are some cool and handy features through which you can capture images in different modes. The front facing camera is decent. It doesn’t provide great picture quality. There is a noticeable shutter lag in the front camera.

During the night, while taking photos of a light source, there is a visible red light around the light source. You can see in the image above, there is a red around the light source. Keeping the price in mind, you can’t complain about camera quality.

Storage and Connectivity:

The smartphone supports 4G LTE connectivity. It supports two Micro SIM cards. It comes with 8GB on-board storage out of 3.5GB is taken by OS and other apps. Around 4.41 GB memory is available for user. There’s a MicroSD card slot though which can expand the storage upto 32GB.

Software/UI:

Coolpad Dazen 1 runs on older Android 4.4.2 Kitkat with a layer of company’s own CoolUI. The UI is very similar to other Chinese ROMs. There is no separate app drawer, all icons are there on the home screen itself. The CoolUI comes with many apps like CoolShow, Rock Wallpaper, Cool Store and Sort out app. The phone also comes pre-installed with popular apps like Facebook, Whatsapp, SwiftKey, Snapdeal, We Chat, WPS Office Clear and file manager.

The CoolUI is easy to use. It offers some useful features like wake up gesture though which you complete various tasks with simple gestures. It also allows to use two apps at the same time using Multi-Screen mode.

There is no word about Android 5.0 Lollipop update, so its actually bad that the company doesn’t bother much about software updates.

Benchmarks:

In the Geekbench 3, Dazen 1 scores 478 Single core Score and 1444 Multi-Core Score. In AnTuTu Benchmark, it scores 19992 points.

Final Verdict:

Coolpad Dazen 1 is cheapest smartphone in India you can buy which comes with 2GB RAM and 4G connectivity. At Rs. 5999, you can’t expect much from a device. But surprisingly Dazen 1 provides top notch performance you can’t complain about. If you leave the camera performance aside, then it is the best budget smartphone priced under Rs. 7,000.

So if you want a good smartphone in the budget range then you can go for Coolpad Dazen 1. It comes in Black and White color. It is exclusively available on Snapdeal via flash sale method.

Update: Soon after publishing the review, the company posted an software update to Coolpad Dazen 1. It is not a major update but a minor update focused on performance improvements. It is a 16.8 MB OTA update and carries a build number OTA_137.00_150.00. After installing the update, we have noticed a minor performance improvement.