Centric A1 Review: Very Good Value For Money

Centric A1 Rear View

Priyanka Telecom is an Indian Manufacturer who has been coming out with very impressive value-for-money phones under the Centric brand. Their latest device is the Centric A1. We spent a considerable amount of time with this device and here is our detailed review of this budget smartphone

The Centric A1 is targeted at people who are looking to get quality mobiles with good hardware and a smooth experience without spending a big budget on it. The phone is very sturdily build. Has an all metal unibody finish. The design is very practical and stands up to above average load that a busy professional can put it through in everyday use. It fits very neatly in one hand and is good to the grip.

Centric A1 Phone

The antenna bands on the rear are very well designed and fit in with the whole device very well. Another notable thing with the design is the fact that the rear camera, the LED flash and the fingerprint scanner are perfectly and symmetrically aligned in the center of the rear side. What this means is, the device looks very premium when you hold in your hand. On par with the flagships of today.

Centric A1 Rear Camera

The headphone socket and sensors are placed on the top and the bottom has a USB Type-C socket that is again perfectly aligned with the center of the device. The socket is flanked by two speaker grills that house the DTS stereo units that are part of the phone. The volume rocker and power button are placed on the right side of the device. Very practical and thoughtful design, definitely a plus.

The phone has a 5.5 inch, 1920 x 1080 px display that is quite crisp and efficient. There are very well fleshed out colors that you can see when you are viewing the screen. The viewing angles are great and sunlight visbility is very good. Even under very harsh lighting, the display is very legible and delivers clear visuals. We tried video loops and heavy graphics on it, the performance was very good. There were no jaded colors or over-saturated hues, very brilliant display.

The next thing we did with the phone to start sessions of very heavy gaming with it. We were very pleasantly surprised with the performance here. The 3 GB RAM and the Snapdragon Octa-core processor get together to deliver very well. There were absolutely no frame drops or any other issues. There was no lag or jitter anywhere. What we liked about the device is the fact that it runs cold, even heavy gaming did not heat it up. Hence the hands are very comfortable during heavy gaming. This is very good given the fact that most devices tend to heat up very badly when used for heavy gaming. We ran a video loop with it and even then there wasn’t any heating that was seen.

Let us now talk about the camera units in the phone. The rear camera unit is a 13 MP sensor with PDAF, 5P lens, f2.0 with a dual LED flash that is situated right under it. The rear unit delivers very crisp pictures and videos. Full HD recording @ 30FPS is supported and so is playback. Photos taken under good lighting conditions and sunlight came out very well. The reds and blues were nearly natural and there was no visible blurring or pixilation in images. The low light imaging is also pretty good given the price of the device. Is it on par with the Redmi phones in the rear camera? Definitely! The front camera is a 8 MP sensor with extra wide 90’FOV and comes with a very useful selfie flash. The front unit gave us very good and wide pictures. The selfie flash stood in good stead when we wanted to take selfies indoors or at night. Overall, given the price of the phone, we are very impressed with the front and rear camera units. They can give tough competition to the current bestsellers and beat them. Ticks all the checkboxes in the camera department. Here are a few pictures we took with the phone.

Flowers

Scenery

Apartment Gate

The fingerprint scanner on the rear is very fast and easy to use. We were able to set it up to read our fingerprint very fast and the average unlock times with the fingerprint we under .3 seconds. This is a good thing to have in a busy day where you cannot be bothered to keep entering passwords or patterns to unlock your phone when you are in the middle of something. The fact that it is aligned with the center of the device perfectly makes it very comfortable to reach when you are holding the phone in the hand. This feature has actually exceeded our expectation and done very well given the price of the phone.

Phone on wall

The phone comes with Android Nougat 7.1.1 out of the box and has a stock UI that is not having any bloatware installed. It is very smooth and clean. The phone supports all Indian 2G/3G/4G bands and we were able to use VoLTE on our Jio SIM with it without any issues. The call quality was good and the speakers delivered very good quality music output with no distortions. We can chalk it up to the DTS support on the device. IT has a hybrid dual SIM slot that supports storage expansion upto 256 GB using a micro SD card.

Centric A1 Front Screen

The battery is a 3000 mAH Li-Polymer one and supports Quick Charge 3.0. On a single charge, with above average WiFi and 4G with Social media and video streaming, it lasted well over 13 hours and this is impressive at this price range. WiFi support is good. The device has a bevy of all sensors that you expect in top end phones.

Verdict

The Cenric A1 has very definitely exceeded our expectations and performed on par with the best phones in the market. At a price of Rs 10,999/- this is a very good value for money phone that we will certainly recommend if you are looking for a good phone with great performance and affordable price.

About Shakthi

I am a Tech Blogger, Disability Activist, Keynote Speaker, Startup Mentor and Digital Branding Consultant. Also a McKinsey Executive Panel Member. Also known as @v_shakthi on twitter. Been around Tech for two decades now.

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