Rating: 7/10
The mobile phones in Lava Fuel Series are with long-lasting batteries. Lava Iris Fuel 60 comes with all features included in Lava Iris Fuel 50 and an even larger 4000 mAh battery.Lava Iris Fuel 60 is available at Rs 8,888.
- Design: 7/10
- Features:6.5/10
- Software:7/10
- Performance: 6.5/10
- Display: 7/10
- Camera: 5.5/10
- Battery Life: 8/10
The phone comes with a stock Android 4.4.2 KitKat OS. Lava does not have any of its proprietary apps on the phone, which is good as it lets you decide which apps to download. This also does not take up much internal storage space.
Under the quick settings menu, you will notice a MemClear soft button, which clears unused memory. The system widget which gave you a real-time graphs of CPU, memory and battery usage over time, that was seen with the Lava Iris Pro 30+ isn’t present on the Iris Fuel 60.
The Lava Iris Fuel 60 supports the HotKnot feature. It’s a MediaTek feature which basically lets you transfer content by just connecting the displays of your mobile phones. It works like NFC, but it uses a lower transmission power and phones do not need to have an NFC chip for data transfer. It makes use of the gravity sensor, proximity sensor and the touch sensor of capacitive touchscreens to create a sort of capacitive coupling to transfer data. Of course, data transfer speeds are much lower than NFC or Bluetooth.
It also features Gesture control which lets you fire the shutter, change photographs in a gallery, change audio tracks using the front-facing camera. Frankly, the gesture to fire the camera shutter can be annoying if you are composing a photograph and your hand gets anywhere close to the front camera. It also supports smart-wake gestures such as drawing alphabets to unlock the screen or directly enter certain apps.The Iris Fuel 60 comes with a 4,000 mAh non-removable battery. It comes with a 1.5A charger which lets you charge the phone from 0-100 per cent in around 3.5 hours. We ran our standard 8-hour loop test which involves a series of real-life usage scenarios (2hr calling + 2hr video playback + 2hr video streaming + 2hr audio streaming) at the end of which there was around 53% battery remaining. This is good enough to easily last you a day and a half on regular usage.
Lava Iris Fuel 60 comes with a 10MP rear camera and a 2MP front camera. The camera is quite ordinary, able to capture usable images only in daylight. Low-light photography is useless as you will get a lot of patchy areas. Even with day light photos, fine details are not prominent. For instance, in a landscape scene having lots of trees, you will barely see any good details in the leaves. The HDR mode is able to fill details in the shadow areas and control the highlights. Video recording is fine as long as the camera is held steady, but the moment you start panning you will see rolling shutter. On the whole, the camera on the Iris Fuel 60 is simple and usable only for sharing casual images online.The phone comes with a 5-inch 1280 x 720 pixel display which gives it a 294 ppi pixel density. Like the Iris Pro 30+, the Fuel 60 does offer a bright display and thanks to the IPS panel, the viewing angles are good. But the glass is a magnet for smudges and can ruin the experience while watching videos, thanks to the glossy surface.