Celkon WIN 400 Windows Phone Hands-on, Photo Gallery

Celkon’s first Windows Phone handset, and straight into the budget range. That’s the spot the company is hitting with a pricing where not many good smartphones are available. But just the pricing doesn’t make the device good enough against others. The Celkon Win 400, running Windows Phone 8.1 is priced at Rs. 4979 and is considered by Microsoft as a smartphone that can reach every hand, thanks to the price tag.

We did play around with the device for a few hours, and here’s our initial thoughts about the same.

Design wise, one should always feel comfortable with a 4-inch device (which has been one such factor for Apple Inc. as well to sell their little sized iPhones), and the Win 400 looks quite neat in looks but it feels light and you get the plastic feel easily. Still, the edges and right placement of external components (buttons and ports) makes this look like not one of those cheap devices. It is overall a decent looking device.

The display, to be frank, is not that good especially with the brightness. Windows Phone with the tile interface contributes a little to it, but the colors don’t show up with good brightness. The screen is a fingerprint magnet and the inadequate brightness adds up to the discomfort while looking at the display from side angles.

The smartphone runs Windows Phone 8.1, the latest version and it doesn’t have the huge bloatware that we recently saw on the Lumia 535 from Microsoft, though a few of those apps were essential and might be something a user might miss on the Win 400. Microsoft’s OneDrive app for cloud storage is pre-installed and it comes with 15GB cloud storage for free. MS Office is there as well, and a few other handy apps are listed.

A little sluggish it feels on the animations as we swipe through the tiles and app list, but I am expecting too much from this entry level phone if I wanted to see some swift performance. It isn’t disappointing after all, when the overall usage is taken into account. The multitasking did make the phone struggle a bit as I noticed a lag of 2-3 seconds every time shifting between the apps, but having a few apps in the background, running with some memory is already something one would appreciate the device for.

Pictures from the launch event:

Little did we try, but the camera was not disappointing. On daylight, it takes decent pictures with good color reproduction, and on low light, there are a lot of grains seen with no proper focus, although the device has a 5-megapixel autofocus camera. The front-facing 1.3 MP camera is no good, but only a good thing for those who wanted something for video calls.

About 1.7GB of free storage is available to the user, out of the 4GB internal and the MicroSD card slot is the best thing for those who wanted extra space for apps or media files. This is a Dual SIM smartphone, but one of them supports 3G connectivity while the other one is limited to 2G data connectivity.

For the initial looks, the Celkon WIN 400 does look like a very good smartphone for the price, and although this is too early to comment, I’m sure this will be a good value for money. Windows Phone 8.1, 3G connectivity, Snapdragon 200 and 1500 mAh battery should be fine if not great for the price of Rs. 5000, keeping itself in a category of sub-5000 where you don’t really see some well performing smartphones from even the huge Android market.