Chinese smartphone maker Phicomm on Wednesday made its debut in India by launching its first smartphone in the country dubbed the Phicomm Passion 660 at Rs. 10,999.
Headquartered in Shanghai, Phicomm is a brand established in 2009 by Shanghai Feixun Communication Co. Ltd. At the launch event in Delhi, CEO Min Zheng told press that the company is looking to manufacture devices in India as well, and it will invest $100 million over the next three years on R&D and marketing.
Coming to the Phicomm Passion 660, the device upfront packs a 5-inch full-HD (1080×1920 pixels) IPS display with Corning Gorilla Glass 3 protection. It is powered by a 64-bit octa-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 615 processor clocked at 1.5GHz and coupled with Adreno 405 GPU and 2GB of RAM.
In terms of design, the Passion 660 reminds us of Huawei’s Ascend P series smartphones. The handset is pretty light and weighs only 110 grams. It grips quite well in hands with its overall compact form factor which measures 139.5x69x7.3mm. Back of the smartphone is non-removable and sports a matte finish. It is backed by a 2300mAh battery, which is non-removable as well.
One of the highlight of Passion 660 is its sensors such as Barometer, Step-counter sensor, Gesture sensor, Magnetometer sensor, G-sensor, L-sensor, P-Sensor, and E-compass.
The smartphone runs on Expect OS UI based on Android 4.4.4 KitKat. We found the UI design to be rather stock Android, but Phicomm has managed a lot interesting tweaks in terms of functionality. We couldn’t manage to see all that in our limited time with the device, but we will surely bring more details about it soon in our full review.
On camera front, the Passion 660 packs a 13-megapixel auto focus camera (Sony IMX214 sensor, f/2.0 aperture) with an LED flash and a 5-megapixel front-facing Ultra Wide Angle camera.
The Passion 660 is a dual-SIM (Micro and Nano-SIM) device that supports 4G LTE globally and both Band 3 and Band 40 in India. The second Nano-SIM slot can also double-up as a microSD card slot that supports up to 64GB expandability. Internal storage on the device is 16GB.
The three capacitive touch buttons sits below the display. Right side of the smartphone includes two SIM card trays (Micro and Nano SIM) and power/ lock key. The volume rocker key is located on the left edge, 3.5mm headphones jack is at the top, and Micro-USB/ data transfer port is on the bottom edge.
The Phicomm Passion 660 comes in Black and White colours and will be available to buy from Amazon India starting June 9.