Spice, of late, has been attacking the low-end smartphone market with renewed vigor. It has not only Android phones in tow, but also a Firefox smartphone and even an upcoming Android One phone. The Spice Stellar 361 aims at cementing Spice’s grip over the lower segment of the smartphone market. Priced at Rs. 4,299 with a 3.5-inch display, it seems reminiscent of a time of 3.5-inch handsets, which ruled the market, back in the day like 5 inchers do today.
In the box:
Spice Stellar 361 smartphone
Charger
USB cable
User Guide
Headphone
Hardware:
The Spice Stellar 361 is a sturdy 3.5-inch smartphone, which has a light built quality. The body is made up of plastic, which the back of the device has plastic squarish pattern which looks pretty cool.
On the front we have a great 3.5 inch HVGA touchscreen display and above it, you will find the Speaker Grill and the front facing camera.
Below the display, you will find capacitive buttons along with the defining feature of the Spice Stellar 361 form factor – A big speaker grill that covers the lower part of the display.
On the left, Spice has placed the microUSB port.
While on the right, we can find the Volume rockers and the accompanying power button.
On the back we have the 2 megapixel camera with LED Flash and the removable back cover which will give you access to the microSD card slot and the SIM slot.
At the top, we find the 3.5mm audio jack.
Display:
Spice has packed in a 3.5-inch HVGA touchscreen display, which gives a has a resolution of 320 x 480pixels. The touch of the Spice Stellar 361 is responsive and we really loved using it. The sunlight visibility is quite okay. The only thing we feel lacking is the brightness, which could have certainly have been better and lent more color to the display.
Performance:
The Spice is powered by a 1GHz dual-core processor coupled with 256 MB of RAM, which would be considered inadequate for a heavy user, but let’s be serious, this phone is not aimed at heavy users.
We would rate the performance of the smartphone as smooth, even though Spice seems to have overloaded it with apps. There were hardly any lags in regular usage and we did not feel like pushing the device to an edge and then criticizing would do it justice.
Software, UI and Storage:
Spice Stellar 361 comes with Android 4.2.2 OS out-of-the-box and is an average Jelly Bean OS phone. It mostly has the same stuff as the other Spice Android phones in this range.
The interesting thing about the software is the pre-installed apps on board, ranging from third-party apps such as OLX, Opera Mini and Getit to Spice’s own Spice Gang and Spice Cloud. Spice is providing its Cloud service even on low-end phones, which kind of explains the brand philosophy of trying to give something extra to the consumer every time.
The internal memory on the device which we received was 512 MB, which will further be expandable using a MicroSD card up to 32 GB.
The user interface on the Spice Stellar 361 is the one you would find on its low-end Android phones. Mostly, it worked fine, although a little more lighting on the handset would have helped it look far better.
Camera:
The Indian giant has included an 2 MP camera, accompanied with flash. On the front, the Spice Stellar 361 has a 1.3 megapixel camera which will enable users to make video chats and video calls with their friends and family.
The camera is unique. It actually gives out images that look like oil paintings, which is more than I could have asked of a 2-megapixel cam.
Check out the camera samples below.
Connectivity and Battery:
Connectivity wise, the Spice Stellar 361 has included 2G, 3G, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and micro USB options for users to make use of. The reception of the network is good and we never faced any issue while using the device.
The Spice Stellar 361 has a powerful 1400 mAh battery which gives some impressive backup to users, which is a good thing for power users as they will go on to use for a good number of hours under regular usage. We got about 12 hours of backup under normal usage, which included switching between 2G and 3G network, push notifications, few hours of calls and more.
Conclusion:
The Spice has been priced at Rs. 4,299 which, we personally feel is a good price for everything that the device has to offer as users could very well go in for, at the same price. If you are not a power user or will not be hesitant in using a low-end phone, Spice Stellar 361 is a nice buy. But, its biggest competition is Spice’s own recently released Firefox phone.
