Too little, too late?

You know how first-borns claim that their parents have huge expectations of them. I’m guessing that’s how Panasonic feels about its first smartphone in India – the Panasonic P 51. Not only is it the first smartphone from the company to be launched here, it comes about four years later than most other manufacturers handsets were introduced to the Indian audience. Hmm… the pressure might be quite something.

After scores of competitor’s handsets already being present in the market, how do you even differentiate yourself from the rest? Well, here’s what Panasonic tried.

First impressions

Panasonic possibly believes in the “first impression lasts” credo, for the P 51 doesn’t come across as a half-hearted attempt at entering the market. The smartphone is built like most other super-smartphones currently available. The P 51 comes with a 5-inch display. The body looks neat, devoid of the usual physical buttons. The Power button and the volume rocker are the only exception. The phone feels a bit wider than most other smarpthones that size. I wonder if I can use all apps and type with just one hand. Predictably, I need to use both if only to hold it and play games, but definitely both to type with. The virtual keyboard on the Panasonic P 51 is surprisingly intuitive. There are a handful of crazy-looking emoticons to go with your SMSes, thanks to Panasonic’s proprietary user interface. Although the overlay isn’t as extensive as on Samsung or LG handsets, the effect is still quite evident.

The Panasonic P 51 has a pixel density of about 294 pixels per inch which make for pretty good resolution and reproduction of images. At its brightest, the display is blindingly vivid. I almost always used it at minimum brightness unless I stepped outdoors and had to pump it up a bit. Even under harsh light, I didn’t have it turn up the brightness to the maximum for the display to be fairly visible.

Now, the phone, just like the Samsung Galaxy Grand Duos, comes with dual SIM capability. You can use two micro SIM cards at the same time, but the phone lets you use 3G on only one of the SIM cards and only GPRS on the other.

Multimedia

The phone has an IPS display which ensures the viewing angles are not compromised. One of the downers in the multimedia section was the audio levels. While the quality of audio wasn’t bad by itself, the levels were really low with some of the media I tried out.

Another aspect of the P 51 that a lot of people might have a problem with is that it only comes with 4 GB of internal memory. While you can use an external memory card for your storage needs, almost every handset now offers at least 8GB of storage space.

The Panasonic P51 is powered by a quad-core processor clocking at 1.2GHz and is paired with 1GB of RAM. The overall performance is pretty satisfactory but on benchmarking tests it doesn’t stand up to the super-smartphones. The Panasonic P51 scored about 3,820 points almost around the same as the Samsung Galaxy Grand Duos.

Another little niggle about the Panasonic P 51 is that charging cord is an AC adapter only. You can’t plug it in to a USB slot, something you can now do with every smartphone in the market. Panasonic packs in a separate cable for that. Also, it earns itself some brownie points for thoughtfully packing in a magnetic cover to protect the unit from scratches.

The smartphone comes with a 8-meg camera which takes pretty decent pictures in well-lit conditions. The capture time is minimal but the camera struggles a bit to focus correctly a lot of the time. It doesn’t handle low-light pics very well either. There are a couple of modes which you can swipe through and select on the top of the app, but most of these such as HDR give pretty mediocre results.

The call quality on the handset was pretty good and we had no complaints whatsoever regarding voice calls. The handset didn’t have any heating issue either.

One of the most impressive aspects of the phone is the battery life. Even with the usual amount of internet usage (via Wi-Fi) it easily gave us company for a full working day, which is something most smartphones fail to do.

Final word

Apart from a few small niggles here and there, the Panasonic P 51 manages to impress especially because it’s a first for the company. And if the morning shows the day, we can’t wait to see what Panasonic does with its next smartphone in India!

Rs 19,990

Love – Good display and battery life

Hate – Limited internal storage, mediocre camera

mahananda.bohidar@thehindu.co.in

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