Fly IQ4403 Energie 3 smartphone review

Fly IQ4403 Energie 3

One of the most significant drawbacks of most Android smartphones is the low level of autonomy. For several years, manufacturers have been trying to increase the time that a smartphone can work autonomously by increasing the battery capacity, but by equipping a smartphone with a more powerful "filling", which, in turn, consumes more energy, manufacturers neutralize all efforts to increase the level of autonomy. For example, in the Ideaphone P780 smartphone from Lenovo, developers still managed to successfully combine a large-capacity battery and a productive, but at the same time, energy-efficient hardware platform, which ensures high levels of device autonomy. Another way to increase the autonomy of work is to optimize the software of the smartphone, in particular the development of more and more efficient power saving modes. The HTC One Dual Sim 802w smartphone is an example of a successful implementation of battery optimization software.

When developing new low-cost smartphones that must demonstrate high autonomy, manufacturers use a combination of a high-capacity battery and a low-performance hardware platform. One of these smartphones is the Fly IQ4403 Energie 3 smartphone. The device is positioned as “long-playing”, which can be understood from the name and belongs to the third generation of this model. What, in addition to high autonomy, this smartphone can offer the user, you will learn from this review.

Contents of delivery

The Fly IQ4403 Energie 3 smartphone is delivered in a small cardboard box with the smartphone itself painted on the front side. Detailed technical specifications of the device are written on the back of the box. The package, in addition to the smartphone itself, includes a USB-microUSB cable, a network adapter, a set of various paper documents and a simple headset with removable foam ear pads.

Appearance and ergonomics

The body of the Fly IQ4403 Energie 3 smartphone is completely made of plastic. Most of the body parts are made of matte plastic and only a strip made of glossy plastic runs along the perimeter of the body. The back panel has a specific pattern in the form of transverse notches forming a diamond pattern. This type of surface prevents the smartphone from sliding in the palm of your hand and improves tactile sensations quite well.

Most of the front panel of Fly Energie 3 IQ4403 is occupied by a touchscreen display. Its frames are wide enough. Under the screen there are three touch-sensitive control buttons "Back", "Home" and "Context Menu". Above the screen are the communication speaker slot, the light sensor and the proximity sensor. There is no front camera lens.

The power / lock button is located on the right side of the device. The paired volume control button for the multimedia speaker is located on the ice side of the smartphone. It is convenient to use the buttons, as they have a short and clear click. The only minor drawback of these controls is that they almost do not protrude above the surface of the side faces, which does not allow you to simply and quickly find them "blindly".

A MicroUSB port is located in the middle of the bottom side. On the right, on the lower side edge, there is a 3.5 mm audio output. With wired headphones connected, holding the smartphone in your right hand is quite uncomfortable, since the plug rests on the palm of your hand. That is why moving the audio output from the upper side edge, where it is more usual to observe it, to the lower side edge, can be considered an unfortunate decision. Also on the lower side face there is a microphone hole. The top side face is empty.

In the upper part of the rear panel of Fly Energie 3 IQ4403 there is a lens of the main camera, LED flash and information about the resolution of the main camera. At the bottom of the rear panel are the manufacturer's logo and a slot for the multimedia speaker.

Describing how the smartphone is in the hand is simple. To do this, it is enough to imagine that you have in your palm a piece of plastic weighing 183 grams, with minimally rounded corners.

After removing the battery cover, the user gains access to the battery, slots for installing SIM cards and a memory card. Special attention should be paid to the interesting placement of the slots, which can be accessed only after removing the battery. Slots for installing SIM cards and memory cards are located one above the other. You can get the second SIM card only after removing the first (topmost) SIM card, and you can remove the memory card only after removing both SIM cards.

The build quality of the device is generally satisfactory. The details fit together well. In everyday use, the case does not creak or play. The main disadvantage of the Fly IQ4403 Energie 3 model's ergonomics can be considered as very thick by modern standards (12.85 millimeters), due primarily to the use of a high-capacity rechargeable battery.

Display

The Fly Energie 3 IQ4403 smartphone is equipped with a 4.5-inch screen with a resolution of 864 x 480 pixels. The matrix of the screen is made using TFT technology, while the majority of modern devices have IPS-matrices that have higher performance characteristics in all respects. Most budget models of smartphones, even the lower price segment, released in 2013, were equipped with IPS-displays, albeit of low quality. The display has mediocre color reproduction - most colors are faded and look unnatural. Even with a slight change in the viewing angle, the colors begin to invert. The brightness of the display backlight can be set between 95 cd / m2 and 325 cd / m2. 50% brightness corresponds to 240 cd / m2 backlight. The maximum brightness is sufficient to ensure readability of the display even in direct sunlight, and the minimum backlight brightness is significantly overstated and does not allow comfortable use of the device in the dark. The contrast of the matrix is 1: 812.

The factory calibration of the matrix is poor. The color gamut is less than the sRGB reference gamut. The color temperature ranges from 8000 to 10000 Kelvin, while the reference value for this indicator is considered to be 6500 Kelvin.

Operating system

The Fly IQ4403 Energie 3 smartphone is powered by the pure Android 4.2.2 operating system. The manufacturer traditionally does not use any proprietary user interface so as not to "load" the smartphone. Some shortcuts for standard applications have undergone purely cosmetic changes, and the settings menu has been divided into two tabs.

The set of preinstalled applications is limited to the software package from Google that is installed on every Android smartphone and Android tablet, as well as some applications that Fly installs on all smartphones, for example, the IVI service, which does not work in Ukraine. Apparently, Fly believes that the user must independently choose the applications he needs.

Communication and multimedia

The Fly Energie 3 IQ4403 smartphone works with two SIM cards, but due to the presence of only one radio module, the principle of their operation is alternating, which means that in standby mode, both SIM cards are available to receive a call, and when talking on one of them the second is out of the network access area. There are no complaints about the quality of sound transmission by the microphone. The volume of the communication microphone is average, it is uncomfortable to talk in the presence of strong ambient noise, since the interlocutor is not heard well. Under normal conditions (at home, in a car, etc.), the volume of the communication speaker is quite sufficient.The multimedia speaker also has a medium volume. If you keep your smartphone in the inner pocket of your jacket, you may not hear the incoming call. The vibration alert is weak, due to the fact that the strength of the vibration motor installed in the smartphone is average, and the body, which it should vibrate, weighs as much as 183 grams.

The standard player cannot boast of either providing high quality music sounding or functionality. When listening to audio recordings at maximum volume with headphones, the noise of the amplifier is clearly audible.

There are no complaints about the functionality of the standard video player, it is quite "omnivorous" and plays almost all popular video formats. The only thing that caused problems for the video player was the audio in AC3 format - it does not play.

"Filling"

The Fly Energie 3 IQ4403 smartphone is based on the MediaTek MT6572W system-on-chip, which includes a 1.3 GHz processor with two Cortex-A7 cores and a Mali-400 MP video chip. The smartphone has 512 megabytes of RAM, of which a little more than 150 megabytes are available to the user. The permanent memory is four gigabytes, of which the user can use approximately 1100 megabytes. If necessary, and it is likely to arise, the permanent memory of the smartphone can be expanded using a microSD memory card with a capacity of up to 32 gigabytes. Applications that support this feature can be transferred from the built-in memory to a memory card and vice versa.

The performance of the Fly Energie 3 IQ4403 smartphone is at the expectedly low level, but quite satisfactory for an inexpensive smartphone. In the synthetic Antutu Benchmark test, the device scored just under 11,000 points. The vast majority of applications start and work stably, but due to the small amount of RAM, it is unlikely that it will be possible to launch more than two applications (of average resource intensity). The desktops scroll smoothly, but sometimes slight slowdowns occur. Casual games work well, but about more resource-intensive programs, for example, 3D games, the owner of the Fly Energie 3 IQ4403 smartphone should forget, since neither the processor's performance nor the amount of RAM is enough for them. Such popular games as Asphalt 8, Real Racing 3, Dead Trigger 2, NOVA 3 either do not start or work, but only at the minimum graphics settings.

The built-in GPS module does not give rise to any complaints. The first search for a satellite signal took less than a minute. If you use a-GPS, the search for satellites is done in a matter of seconds.

Camera

The Fly Energie 3 IQ4403 smartphone is equipped with one camera - the main one. Unfortunately, there is no front camera. The main camera module is paired with an LED flash, but does not support auto focus. The camera provides the user with basic photography and video recording capabilities. The number of settings is minimal, the viewfinder interface is very austere.

The quality of the recorded content (both photos and videos) is average even by the standards of budget smartphones. The HDR mode, which is already available in most budget smartphones, is absent in the Fly IQ4403 smartphone.

Autonomy of work

As mentioned earlier, high autonomy is perhaps the main advantage of the Fly Energie 3 IQ4403 model, which is once again reminded by the Energie prefix in the name. The removable battery has an impressive 4000 mAh. In practice, the smartphone can easily withstand two days of active (as far as the multimedia capabilities allow) operation. By "active operation" we mean using the Wi-Fi module to access the Internet, about half an hour of talking, half an hour of Internet browsing, sending messages on social networks, half an hour of listening to music, synchronizing Google accounts, two hours of watching videos, and all this in one day ... If you moderately use the capabilities of the smartphone, then without recharging it can work a little more than four days.

It is also worth noting that the smartphone has a special mode called "Power Saving". The user can choose one of the modes with the default settings, or independently configure which modules will automatically turn off when the smartphone reaches a certain level of battery discharge. The main feature of the "Power Saving" mode is to reduce the processor frequency to one gigahertz. This allows you to reduce power consumption, but noticeably affects the performance and, accordingly, the speed of the system as a whole, even desktops begin to scroll through with delays.

In the synthetic battery performance test Antutu Tester, the Fly Energie 3 IQ4403 smartphone scored 1370 points. However, this is the case when the autonomy of a smartphone in real use is much higher than that indicated by synthetic tests.

conclusions

Fly smartphones have always been distinguished by a balanced price-performance-quality ratio, but apparently this principle has bypassed the Fly Energie 3 IQ4403 model, since the only, but very significant advantage of this model is its impressive autonomy. The rest of the smartphone is a very mediocre model of the budget segment of Android smartphones, as evidenced by a screen with a TN matrix, a small amount of RAM, a very thick body, etc.

If for you the autonomy of the device is a key factor when choosing a new Android smartphone, but you cannot afford to buy the Lenovo Ideaphone P780, then the Energie 3 model is out of competition. If autonomy is not a very important factor for you when choosing a new smartphone, but you do not want to overpay, then even the Fly IQ4404 Spark model, which is cheaper than Fly Energie 3 IQ4403, looks more balanced and, accordingly, more attractive.