Philips Xenium i908 Review

Philips is not known for its smartphone in the Indian Smartphone market. But to make its place in the smartphone market, Philips has launched Xenium I908 at Rs 11790 to compete against the much more established rivals.

Design

The Philips i908 has an octa-core CPU and Full HD display, this device comes with a big battery at an affordable price. It measures 8.8 mm in thickness, weighs 155.80 grams and has a textured finish at the back that looks like leather.

The handset has rounded corners that offer good grip. The front is covered with Dragon Trail glass and is accomplished with an earpiece, notification LED, front camera, 3 capacitive buttons, and sensors. With the removable back cover, this phone is designed in the very clean way with the main camera with LED flash and a speaker.

Below the cover there are two regular SIM slots, a reset button, and a microSD card slot.

At the top, we found a 3.5mm audio jack and microUSB port. The bottom hosts a microphone, and on the left volume rocker and at the right power button is placed.

Display

Philips Xenium i908 hosts a 5-inch IPS LCD Full HD (1080x1920p), with 441 ppi density. The display offers a bright, crisp and vivid experience. It has wide viewing angles and comes with Clear Motion technology, for improved video fluency. The LUX rating of the display is 281 LUX which not much impressive. In spite of low LUX rating, we didn’t find any difficulty in reading the text in bright sunlight.

Camera

For photography Philips Xenium i908 is packed with a 13-megapixel autofocus main camera, with a Sony Exmor RS sensor, with BSI as well as a 5-megapixel camera at the front. The camera app has multiple modes to enhance your photography capabilities such as HDR, Face Beauty, Panorama, Multi-Angle, Auto Detect Scene, Auto Smile Capture, Consecutive Shots, Gesture Shot and Live Photo. There’s also Zero Shutter Delay, Voice Command, Face Detect, Timer and Continuous shot options. You can set up the resolution at 13 MP, 12 MP or 8 MP and ISO up to 1600. It captures crisp images with a good balance of color and saturation in daylight condition. But disappointed with low light shooting due to asynchronous of flash with the camera. The front camera is of 5 megapixels which are great for selfie lovers.

Performance

For processing, it has a 1.7 GHz MediaTek MT6592, Cortex A7 octa core processor. It also has a GPU - Mali 450 MP4 with 2 GB of RAM, 16 GB of internal storage and a microSD card slot with support up to 32 GB. We run much low to high-end graphics games, and found no visible lag in the performance, even while switching between apps. The browsing and multitasking performance on this smartphone are pretty much good. The telephony section brings 3G only on one SIM card at a time, dual standby support and a powerful signal on both cards. The calls are loud and clear and we’ve also got speed dial.

The battery is a Li-Ion unit with a 3000 mAh capacity which is non-removable. In our test, that involves HD video playback in a loop, over Wi-Fi, on full brightness and volume, it lasted for 6 hours and 48 minutes.

For music aficionados, this phone generates loud and clear sound. The bass is also good and there’s no distortion. The stock music player is coming with the in built-in EQ is the stock one.