Lava Iris Fuel 60 review: At Rs 8,888, this long-lasting budget phone should be on your shortlist

The Fuel series in the Lava eco-system is all about phones with long-lasting batteries. We had seen the Lava Iris Fuel 50 come out in November, with a 3000 mAh battery. A month later we have the Lava Iris Fuel 60, which keeps most of the internals but houses an even larger 4000 mAh battery  – this when, a couple of weeks back we had seen the Gionee Marathon M3 which came with a 5000mAh battery. So does the Lava Iris Fuel 60 offer a better value proposition at Rs 8,888 over the Marathon M3 (considering the M3 is priced at Rs 13,999)? Let us find out. Build and Design: 7/10 Thanks to the high capacity battery, the Lava Iris Fuel 60 is thick on the sides measuring 10.2mm. That is thick, compared to the **slim phones** we are seeing these days, but then the Iris Fuel 60 is not really competing in that department. The back cover is removable and has a mild curvature around the edge which helps with the grip. The left-hand edge is clean whereas you have the volume rocker and the power/standby button on the right hand side. The placement of the buttons is too flush with the edge making activating them a bit of an issue. There is barely any tactility and this may cause you to press the power button while lowering the volume or vice versa. Also when placed in the pocket, because the power button is close to the edge, it suffers a lot of accidental presses. The microUSB port and audio jack are located up top. I liked the slightly rubberised finish on the rear cover which helps with the grip. The back cover is easily removable and is made from cheap plastic which bends easily. On opening the cover, you will come across a non-removable battery with a dual-SIM and a microSD card slot above it. Beside the SIM card slot, you have the camera section with an LED flash unit beneath it.  Coming to the front face, the bezel of the Iris Fuel 60 does occupy a lot of space on the top and bottom, even the sides aren’t particularly slim either. The display comes with IPS panel and a Corning Gorilla Glass covering, but it is also a smudge-magnet. The overall build quality is decent, but is marred by the button placement on the right hand side. Also Lava could have surely used a thicker plastic rear cover, as using a flimsy thin cover does not make the phone any slimmer.   Features: 7/10  Lava Iris Fuel 60 houses a MediaTek MT6582 system on chip which has a quad-core processor clocked at 1.3GHz which comes with a Mali 400 GPU. It is paired with 1GB of RAM and there is 8GB of internal storage of which 6.12GB is available to the user. It runs Android 4.4.2 and it does not have any sort of customisations on the UI. It has a 5-inch HD display with an IPS panel and Corning Gorilla Glass 3 layer on top. The USP of the device is the 4,000mAh battery. This is a non-removable battery of course.   Software: 7/10 Like we said above, 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.   Performance: 6.5/10 [caption id=“attachment_250664” align=“aligncenter” width=“640”]  From L to R: AnTuTu, PC Mark for Android and Quadrant[/caption] Since the Lava Iris Fuel 60 houses the mid-range MediaTek MT6582 SoC, the performance is decent enough to get you by with regular everyday tasks such as surfing the web, working with multiple open applications and so on. The benchmark scores as seen above hint at a strictly mid-range device. As for gaming we could play RipTide 2 GP, Fruit Ninja comfortably, but higher-end games such as Asphalt 8 tend to stutter. Despite having 1GB of RAM, we did not experience any app freezing or random shut-down of apps, unless it is a heavy game app. The earpiece speaker was loud enough and call quality was good overall. We did not experience any call drops while using the phone. In terms of video playback it can playback most formats you thrown at it, although we noticed some stutter while playing back high bit-rate full HD files, specially when seeking through the video. Bundled earphones are quite poor and you will be much better off investing in a good pair of earphones. Display: 7/10  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. I did notice mild backlight bleeding around the edges. Camera: 5.5/10  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.    Battery Life: 8/10 This is the most important feature as far as this phone is concerned. 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. The Gionee Marathon M3, which has a 5,000 mAh battery had around 68% battery remaining after the 8-hour loop test.   Verdict and Price in India The Lava Iris Fuel 60 is meant only for those who want a long-lasting phone. At Rs 8,888, Lava has priced it reasonably considering it comes with a 4,000 mAh battery. The performance is average, battery life is very good, camera quality is good only daylight and mediocre under low lights. The clean Android OS is welcome and I liked that Lava does not bundle any bloatware with the phone. The build quality could have certainly been better but if you are on a budget, this phone should certainly be on your shortlist.