Hyve Pryme Review: Expensive Smartphone with Nothing Special to Offer

Hyve – an Indian start-up which entered the market last year with Buzz and Storm smartphones has launched its new flagship– Hyve Pryme – at Rs 17,999 with big 5.7-inch display and uncompromised power of stock Android.

Design, Build and UI: Solid

The Hyve Pryme has a 5.7-inch screen, with a 2.5D Arc Glass Curved display. The phone looks premium but is heavy. Above the display, we have the front facing camera, earpiece and standard sensors along with a front-facing flash. On the left, you’ll find the SIM card and expandable storage tray (hybrid Dual-SIM slot) with the power button and volume rocker on the right. The rear houses the 13MP camera, along with the dual-tone LED flash. The fingerprint sensor is located just below the rear camera.

However, the design of the phone is very generic and there’s nothing unique about it. The display has decent viewing angles, but visibility under direct sunlight can be a problem. People who spend a good amount of time watching movies or playing games on their device will instantaneously fall in love with Hyve Pryme thanks to a 1080p display.

You’ll observe a slight lag while typing and the touch latency is higher than expected.

Coming to the UI, Pryme offers a near-stock Android experience with no bloatware, which is good. There are no preloaded apps and you'll find Turbo Download and flip cover options. Flip cover allows you to lock the device when the flip cover is on and Turbo Download works using cellular and Wi-Fi to download large files faster. This works with files larger than 20MB.

Another interesting feature is the phone’s ability to use different networks and combine them to increase download speed.

Overall the display is acceptable and the UI is good.

Performance: Good for multitasking

Hyve Pryme is one of the few phones in India which is powered by the MediaTek Helio X20 SoC. The benefit of having a deca-core processor is that it can run all the apps without any lag with a quick load time. This phone is superb for multitasking and we had 15 apps running in the background but we didn’t face any issues. The device comes with a fingerprint sensor but the response time is slow compared to other phones and at times the response is not registered.

Gaming: Decent

We played some graphic intensive games on the device and the results were not that good. Games like Asphalt 8 and Mortal Kombat showed noticeable frame skips and inconsistent frame rates. The overall gaming experience is nothing compared to the smartphones powered by the Snapdragon 652 or the Snapdragon 820. So if you love to push your device to its limit with heavy games then this smartphone is not for you.

Camera: The biggest disappointment

We were not impressed with the overall image quality of Hyve Pryme. Images lack detail, especially when you expand them. Under low light condition the camera performance suffers and it can’t capture details.

However, if you are shooting in broad daylight then Hyve Pryme won’t disappoint you.

The front 8MP shooter comes with a flash and is good for people suffering from selfie-syndrome.

Battery life: Solid

The battery on Hyve Pryme can last for a day on regular usage, which includes browsing through social media, messaging, listening to music and watching a few videos. In our battery test, it lasted for 7 hours.

Verdict: Better options available

The problem with smartphone manufacturers these days is that they don’t have much to offer apart from beefed up specs. Hyve Pryme falls under this very category where there’s nothing much apart from the big screen and decent gaming performance. Multi-tasking is not an issue and it can easily handle most of the basic tasks with ease.

The phone has a slightly big display with a good battery life but is too expensive for the kind of limited performance it offers. You can also consider LeEco Le Max2, Lenovo Z2 Plus, and Xiaomi Mi Max.