Display and Touch
Symphony Roar A50 Android One smartphone has a 4.5-inch IPS display with a resolution of 480 x 854 pixels. The display is bright, colorful and well-saturated. I wouldn’t go as far to compare it with the display with my Moto G, which is a well-balanced entry-level smartphone, but the colors of Symphony Roar A50 display looks nice and beautiful. Perhaps better than most other smartphones from Symphony around this price.
The light sensor on Symphony Roar A50 really helps. I turned the auto brightness indoors, and the brightness was quite low; enough to make staring at the screen comfortable. I then stepped outside and the phone’s display brightness suddenly went up keeping the same level of display brightness. Under direct sunlight, you would wish that the brightness was a bit, well, brighter. But for me personally, it was okay. I didn’t have any problem reading materials on the screen under direct midday sunlight.
Folks who have used an IPS display before will find the touch sensitivity of the display of Symphony Roar A50 familiar. But there’s a catch. The screen protector paper that is attached on top of the screen significantly degrades the touch responsive to the screen. You won’t miss anything, nor will your touch go unregistered, but you will feel moving your finger on the display is a bit stiff experience as opposed to when there is no screen protector paper on the display.
I took out the screen protector as soon as I got the phone because I find that irritating. The screen protector on my Moto G is still on because the touch experience is smooth even with the protector paper on. Symphony Roar A50…not so much. I did discover later during the recording of video review that Symphony delivered an extra screen protector with the phone in the box. Perhaps I will attach that protector before I put the phone up for sale. Regardless, it’s a nice to have the extra screen protector paper in the box.
Hardware Performance
Let’s see, how do you measure the hardware performance of a device? A popular answer will be to benchmark using different benchmarking applications. While there is an ongoing debate about whether benchmarking a phone provides any information that actually matters, it still remains to be a way to judge how capable the hardware of a device is. Not that everyone performs tasks that are super hardware intensive, still people like to know that their device can take it when they throw at it.
In my personal day-to-day use, I do not do much that requires tons of hardware use. I’m a heavy multi-tasker, that means on any time you will notice about 10+ apps open in the background. I tend to not go to task switcher and remove the apps that are running in the background, and that’s probably because I’m lazy. But this helped me figure out how good Symphony Roar A50 performs when there are multiple apps running in the background.
As with most, if not all, Symphony smartphones, the Roar A50 comes with Android Assistant installed. I ran the device about 4 days without restarting or cleaning up RAM or anything. I ran Skype, Viber, YouTube, and a number of other apps simultaneously which caused the battery backup to be reduced significantly, but I didn’t notice any noticeable lag in performance.
Sure, the occasional 2-second delay in returning to the homepage does happen from time to time. But that happens on my Moto G running Android 5.0.2 Lollipop, too. I think that’s got to do with core Android operating system and not the hardware. It’s an optimization thing. More importantly, it didn’t slow me down that much.
Switching from app to app was a smooth experience. Thanks to the brilliant touch responsive of the display, regular day-to-day operation was fast enough to cope up with my robotic hands. All in all, I’m more than satisfied with the device’s performance. If you’d like me to test a particular application that you think is hardware intensive, just let me know in the comments sections I’ll be happy to test it out for you.
Next page brings you Interface and Camera
