Spice launched the Stellar Mettle Icon Mi-506, the first phone with a metal build in the Stellar series last month, after launching three affordable phones in the Spice Smart Flo Mettle series. Recently we reviewed the Spice Smart Flo Mettle 5X Mi-504 that has similar specifications as the Stellar Mettle Icon, but this has a completely different design and comes with 3G support. It is priced at Rs. 6,999. Is this phone worth the price? Let us find out in the complete review.
Unboxing
We unboxed the Spice Stellar Mettle Icon recently. Check out the unboxing below.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVwEkw7pZcM
Box Contents
The box contents include:
- Silver Spice Stellar Mettle Icon
- In-ear earphones with mic, styled like the ones that come with the iPhone
- Scratch guard
- micro USB cable
- USB wall charger
- Flip case
- User manual, warranty and safety information
Video Review
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fT2YxXMPUYg
Hardware and Design
The first thing you notice is the design of the phone that reminds us of the HTC One with black bezel around the display and metal enclosures on the top and the bottom. All these things makes the phone with 5-inch display really huge. The width of the phone is 72.9mm, decent for a 5-inch phone but the height of the phone is 145 mm, bit taller than most phones with a 5-inch display.
Coming to the display, the 5-inch display with a resolution of 854 by 480 at 196 PPI is not the best. The display is too glossy and is prone to fingerprints. The viewing angles are not good and it is hardly visible under direct sunlight when brightness is set to auto. You have to manually adjust the brightness in such case to read the on-screen text properly. Since it is reflective, watching videos is also a not easy in brightly-lit condition. It is decent in indoor conditions.
It has a 1.3-megapixel camera on the top that offers VGA video recording. It also has the usual set of proximity and ambient light sensors next to the camera.
There are capacitive touch buttons for menu, home and back are present on the bezel, below the display. These are not backlit, but offer haptic feedback when pressed. Usually you need to press and hold the home button or the back button to bring up the recent apps or multitasking window on Android phones that doesn’t have on-screen buttons, but long pressing the home button in this phone launches Google Now. Nothing happens when you long press the other two buttons either. Double tapping on the Home key brings up the recent apps window on the HTC one, but nothing happens in this phone. Spice should really look into it and push an update to fix the issue, since it requires you to download a separate app to close the background apps like the Nokia X.
The power button and the volume rockers on the left side have metal finish as well. The phone is 9.6 mm thick.
On the right side there is a micro USB slot.
On the top there is a 3.5mm audio jack.
On the bottom there is a tiny microphone hole.
The phone has solid build quality. It has metal finish on the front, sides and the back. On the back, the center part is made of metal and the top and bottom have plastic finish.
The phone feels pretty good in hand and doesn’t slip out easily since it has brushed metal finish. At 177 grams, it is bit heavier than other phones in this range.
On the back there is a 8-megapixel camera with LED flash.
There is a large loudspeaker grill on the plastic part on the back.
The back cover could be removed easily. It reveals the SIM and micro SD card slots and a large removable battery.
The phone has dual SIM support. The primary standard SIM card slot is present on the far left, the micro SD card slot is present in the center and the secondary micro SIM slot is present next to it.
It also comes with a free flip cover, but it is not a magnetic flip cover. It has fully shiny plastic back, unlike the brushed metal finish on the original back cover.
Camera
The 8-megapixel rear camera is below average. It has issues with focusing and doesn’t have touch to focus option, so most of the images were out of focus. Outdoor images are decent, but it has a lot of noise. It also had white balance issues and the colors were not vibrant. Looks like it’s the same camera module that was present in the Smart Flo Mettle 5x. All other camera features are similar to most other phones running on Android 4.2, including HDR, Panorama, different scene modes and more. Check out some camera samples.
The phone can record videos at 720p HD resolution, but the video did not have much details and had issues focusing. Since the phone lacks a secondary microphone audio is not crisp.
Software
The phone runs on Android 4.2.2 (Jelly Bean). It is pretty much stock, but the icons are a bit different. You get a lot of features including lockscreen widgets, Google Now, Rich notifications, Quick settings and more.
Spice has also added some exclusive features such as Auto call recorder, Flip to mute, Intelligent answer (lets you answer calls just by bringing the phone close to your ears), Direct call (call a contact directly from your Phone book or message inbox just by raising the phone to your ear) and M Tracker.
It has 468MB of usable RAM out of 512MB, out of which about 157MB of RAM is free when the phone is idle. It comes with 1.48GB of internal storage for apps and 1GB for other media use. You can also set the default write disk to either phone storage or SD card and also move supported apps to the SD card.
Apps
The phone comes with the usual set of utility apps and Google apps. It also comes pre-loaded with Getit, GreetZAP, OLX, Opera Mini, Smart Calls, WeChat, Spice Cloud (with free cloud storage to store data), SpiceGang and a link to download WhatsApp.
Music Player and FM Radio
It comes with a separate music player, other than the Play Music. It can play a range of audio formats. It also has equalizer, Bass boost and 3D effect features when you are listening using earphones. It has FM Radio with auto tune and recording, but lacks RDS. The Apple EarPods-like earphones are pretty good and the loudspeaker output is also good and quite loud even in noisy environment.
Dual SIM and Connectivity
The Dual SIM manager is similar to other dual SIM Android smartphones in the market. You can set a default SIM for several operations including voice call, video call, Messaging and Data connection. Since this is a dual SIM phone, you get options to switch to either SIM cards from the notification bar. You can also choose ‘Always ask’ option for voice calls and Messaging that gives you option to complete the operation after you choose either SIM cards. The connectivity features include, 3G HSPA+, WiFi 802.11 b/g/n, Bluetooth and GPS.
Performance and Benchmarks
The phone is powered by a dual-core MediaTek MT6572 SoC with clocked at 1.3 GHz per core and has Mali-400 MP GPU. The synthetic benchmark scores are good, but the real life performance could be better. It had occasional lags, mainly due to just 512MB of RAM. Since the multitasking is not proper, apps running in the background doesn’t close so it consumes more RAM, making the device slow. Gaming performance is average. Even some low-end games did lag, but the graphics in these games were decent. Check out the benchmarks .
Quadrant Benchmark
The Stellar Mettle Icon scored 3306 points in the quadrant benchmark and grabs the second spot.
AnTuTu Benchmark 4
The Spice Mi-506 managed to score 11119 points in the AnTuTu benchmark 4.
Vellamo 2 HTML5
It scored 1687 points, better than most other smartphones in the Vellamo 2 HTML browser benchmark. Check out the complete set of Spice Stellar Mettle Icon Mi-506 benchmarks here.
Battery life
The phone packs a 1800 mAh battery, which lasts for a day easily with average use on 3G with both the SIM cards enabled. The battery life is definitely better than most other smartphones in this price range.
Conclusion
Overall, the Spice Stellar Mettle Icon is a decent smartphone at a price of Rs. 6,999. Display is glossy and the camera has focus issues, but the battery life is good and the phone also has 3G support. If you are looking for a smartphone with good build and a battery life, but can compromise on display and camera, go for it.
Pros
- Good build quality
- Competitive price tag
- Good battery life
- Good loud-speakers
Cons
- Average display
- Bit heavy and bulky
- Average performance
- Below average camera