Lava has been among the top growing smartphone brands for the past two to three years, with its affordable, value-for-money offerings with good performance for the price tags.
The new Blaze AMOLED 2 aims to offer a slim 5G device at Rs 13,499. Does it have enough to be a consideration for you?
The first thing you might notice about the device is its slimness, measuring 7.55mm and that visor at the back that might remind you of the Google Pixel or the OnePlus Nord 4 a bit.
The phone has a plastic body through and through, with a shiny back in the Midnight Black model, and less on the Feather White model. With curved corners and around 174 grams in weight, this IP64 dust and water-resistant phone is comfortable to carry around.
The right side carries the volume buttons and power/lock key. The top houses one outlet for loudspeakers, an infrared port and a secondary mic; the bottom carries the dual SIM + microSD card hybrid tray slot, USB type C port and the second outlet for loudspeakers.
The 6.67-inch full HD+ (2400x1080) AMOLED supports up to 120Hz refresh rates. It's a fairly bright display with okay viewing angles that's usable outdoors under direct sunlight. You can play full HD videos on it and get good sharpness and colour combination for the price tag.
Powered by MediaTek's Dimensity 7060 chipset (up to 2.6Ghz octa-core processor and BXM-8-256 GPU) with 6GB LPDDR5X RAM (higher variant comes with 8GB) and 128GB UFS3.1 internal storage. It's running on Android 15 with barely any third-party stuff pre-loaded.
The phone's day-to-day performance is more than good enough, and it shows very little lag when moving between social media apps, messaging apps and YouTube once in a while. Lava promises only one major OS upgrade and two years of security patches, but otherwise, this is a good performer, and internal hardware is in place for a sub-15k device.
The phone boasts a 50MP and 2MP camera combination. The main camera can take nice shots in medium to bright lighting settings. There is a little bit of shutter lag even in suitable conditions. In low light, it can struggle quite a bit and the same for the video. You can try to keep the phone steady, but there's often a lot of graininess. The front-facing 8MP camera does a good job of taking selfies, and for video calls, it's not a deal breaker.
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The device is equipped with a 5,000mAh battery unit and comes with a 33-watt charger with a USB Type-C to Type-C cable (along with a protective case). You can expect to get a full day of use from the phone quite regularly without any major battery drainage issues. The bundled charger can charge it from 1 per cent to full in a little under 1.5 hours.
It has WiFi 5 only at most, but that's sufficient for many and works well, so does GPS and Bluetooth. 5G network reception is also not bad and can be used for working outdoors.
The Lava Blaze AMOLED 2 is a pretty good performer on most counts and does offer a lot of things for the price tag. So, for those who may be looking for a budget 5G device or a second phone without going above Rs 15,000 and no bloatware out of the box, the phone is definitely worth a look.