MTV Volt: Falls Slightly Short of Electrifying

The MTV Volt comes with a pre-installed player that offers access to MTV on the go. The unit we received had a back panel with a sleeve attached to it, but there was also another back panel without any attached sleeve provided in the box.

The OS interface is good. The MTV Volt comes with Android version 4.1.1 with support for Flash 11.1. The home screens, icons, etc. work in a predictable manner.

When fully charged, streaming a movie on YouTube over Wi-Fi caused the battery to drain in a little over 7 hours. In this price range, only the Mitashi BE-200 has a better battery life.

A price tag of Rs. 12,999 puts it as a direct competitor to the Stellar Pad MI 1010 (also from Spice), which offers a mixture of better as well as worse specifications in different categories, but still holds value for money.

A dual-core 1 Ghz processor is slightly less than what can be expected at this price, as even the Acer Iconia B1 which sells for about 5000 less, has a dual-core 1.2 GHz processor. 512 MB of RAM is not sufficient to make up for this deficiency.

The screen has a resolution of 854x480. It is a 6" LCD FWVGA capacitive touchscreen. Colour reproduction is excellent, although the resolution could have been higher for this size.

The single biggest pain point of having an MTV Volt, is the relatively meagre 4 GB storage, although it offers the usual expandable storage support of upto 32 GB. Among the latest phablets/tablets that we have reviewed, there is none that costs upwards of Rs. 11,000 yet comes with only 4 GB of built-in storage capacity.

Coming to benchmarks, the dual-core processor and DDR-3 RAM in the MTV Volt help it to score a modest 6167 in the Antutu benchmark, which is better than many sub-15000 tablets. However, the same is not reflected in the case of graphics, where the An3DBench test, which evaluates graphics' performance, scores only 6008. An3DBenchXL gives a score of 23851. The HTML5 chapter of the Vellamo Mobile test, which evaluates browsing performance, reports a score of 1295, which puts it almost at the top of all sub-15000 tablets we have reviewed, with only the Spice Stellar Pad MI 1010 managing to post a better score.