IPRO Sense Gii Plus review

IPRO is a Malaysian company that caters to the needs of the Malaysian market with their line-up of mobile devices. The company has quite a following among those looking for low-cost devices as most of IPRO products come at affordable prices. And the device we are reviewing today is no different. A low-cost device meant to bring quality without the hefty price tag usually associated with good products.

Unboxing

It comes in a generic looking box with the necessary labelling, and that’s it. But people don’t pay to see the box, people pay to get what’s in the box. Besides the phone, you get a 800 mA charger (really? 800 mA?), some in-ear buds and a charging cable as well as a complementary flip case. The free case is a nice touch as I doubt you will be able to get third-party casings for this device.

Appearance

Next, the phone. Well, as I have mentioned in my hands-on experience at the previous IPRO media gathering, I was really impressed with the build quality of the IPRO Sense Gii Plus. And once again, with it in my hands, I am awestruck by the awesome build quality.

Go through the slideshow to see the phone. Or you can also open up the hands-on post for more photos of that awesome metal band. Heck it impresses me to no end to have a metal frame in a RM299 phone when Samsung didn’t use metal all the way until they released the Note 4, at RM2499. LOL. The solid build quality looks sturdy enough to survive more than just a few drops.

Enough loitering outside, let’s go undercover.

Under the glossy metallic back cover lies a 1800mAh battery that isn’t great by today’s standards, but should be fairly adequate to keep this dual-core smartphone alive for quite a while. We will discuss it later.

Support for microSD card expansion (I am not exactly sure what’s the maximum size, but my 64GB Sandisk Ultra didn’t work), and dual SIM functionality. If you observe carefully, the SIM1 slot accepts full sized SIM cards while the SIM2 slot accepts microSIM cards. As all my SIM cards are already cut to the microSIM size, I have no way of testing dual SIM functionality in this phone.

Specifications

• Mediatek MT6572 dual-core 1.3Ghz
• 512MB RAM
• 5.5″ 720p IPS Display
• 4GB internal (expandable with microSD up to 16GB)
• Camera: 5MP main, 2MP front
• Android KitKat 4.4.2
• Dual-SIM capability
• 1800 mAh battery

User Experience

Starting up the phone, you are greeted with a bright orange screen with the IPRO logo. Then you will reach the Android log-in process standard to all Android phones, and after that you will arrive at the home screen. IPRO has been wise to not load the launcher with tonnes of widgets by default like I have seen a certain other manufacturer does.

The first thing I wanted to do was to run Antutu benchmark on it, but I just couldn’t get it to finish the benchmark. It would always crash out without any error message and I didn’t have a score. But on the other hand, we all know that it will not top benchmarks with the dual-core and 512MB RAM chugging within the metal frame. So I went ahead and started using the phone as it should be, as a phone.

Overall performance is full of stutters, not really smooth so you don’t get the fluid transitions you might get in a (much) pricier phone. But given the price there will definitely be compromises.

The buttons on this device requires a firm press to register. No wobble or any unwanted movement is observed from the buttons. The home button doesn’t wake the phone, so those who are used to using Samsung devices might find this a bit weird.

And the multitasking button doesn’t exactly function as that. It is actually a menu button but labelled as a multitasking button. The actual multitasking window comes up when you long-press the home button. There doesn’t seem to be a way to access Google Now.

The screen is very nice. It’s a 5.5″ IPS panel right there. Colors are bright but a bit on the cool side. You can see individual pixels if you look hard enough at it. But from a regular distance it is just alright. Text is rendered quite sharply on this device. Sadly the phone is unable to play 720p .mp4 movies from my collection. Would have made a good device to watch movies on with that screen.

I installed Whatsapp, and noticed the first software quirk. The status bar fades white, rendering most of the notification icons on it very hard to see. A small quirk but annoying nonetheless. This issue also appears in many of IPRO’s built in apps like the dailer, messaging and browser.

When I wanted to show off the built-in widgets to you guys, I stumbled upon a rather cool feature as well. The home screens shift into 3D for you to select the home screen you want to move a widget to. Cute.

Music listening is a slight problem with this phone. There is a kind of echo-ey effect to it that makes the music sound bad on my Piston 2.1. But it supports FLAC, MP3, M4A formats so you should be good to go if you can bear with it. The loudspeaker is capable of outputting pretty acceptable sound quality. As long as you keep it around 2 notches below maximum volume, it sounds pretty good. At maximum volume some distortion is heard.

Call quality is adequate but not really the best. You hear a tinny version of the person on the other end. But the he/she hears you loud and clear. Browsing the web with this phone is generally a sluggish experience with pages loading rather slowly. Scrolling is quite smooth even on image heavy sites. Pinch to zoom works as expected.

Camera performance is very poor. All the details are smudged as you can see you can barely make out the keys on my keyboard.

Battery life was quite good. With WiFi on all the time, and some Clash of Clan (yes, it supports CoC quite well), Whatsapp and some browsing, I am getting more than a day’s battery life like that with more than 4 hours of on-screen time and the battery is still at 60%. I think battery life is especially important for low-end phones where the user will be using it for critical calls and messaging and may not have the liberty of being near a charger. I believe the compromise of pure horsepower for battery life is a good call.

Conclusion

The IPRO Sense Gii Plus is a good phone. Solid build quality, issue-free and has excellent looks. What else can you ask for by paying on RM299? Yes there are faster phones out there for RM299, but I doubt there are any that are as well built as this IPRO Sense Gii Plus. The ASUS Zenfone 4 is now currently going for RM299 but it has a much smaller 4″ screen of poorer quality, although the processor is quite a bit more advanced than the one in the IPRO. If only they used faster innards for the IPRO Sense Gii Plus…