Panasonic Eluga Ray 550

Panasonic’s budget phone has all the necessary features one looks for in a regular use phone. It has a good camera and good phone performance and should not lag if usage is kept moderate. But the phone is not meant for heavy usage daily or for big gaming apps.

Panasonic Eluga Ray 550 has a plastic body with metal back panel. It is bezel less, 8.5mm thick and weighs a light 152 grams. It is available in 3 colours, blue, black and gold. The phone display  is well protected by Asahi Glass. There is a rear mounted fingerprint sensor in the smartphone as well. The phone’s design is sleek and the phone looks pretty good when compared to other phones in the same budget.

This Panasonic model has a 5.7 inches IPS LCD capacitive touchscreen with 16M colours. It has a pixel resolution of 720 x 1440 and an aspect ratio of 18:9 with a 282 PPI density. The smartphone has a screen to body ratio of 75% and a 2.5 D layer of Asahi Glass protection. The company also provides a plastic screen protector as well as a plastic case in the phone box. The narrow and tall display screen fits comfortably in one’s hands. It has a 720p HD screen which makes the contents of the screen vivid and sharp. The phone’s display has good colours but the viewing angles are not good enough. The screen size, resolution and quality of images is pretty good and gives the phone a good look as well as a sellable feature. 

Eluga Ray 550 is powered by a Quad core 1.3 GHz Cortex A53 Mediatek MT6737H Mali T720M02 processor. It has the previous Android version 7.0 Nougat. This model has a 3 GB RAM with 32 GB internal storage and an expandable memory of 128 GB through a dedicated micro SD card slot. The phone has good graphics, and is good for multitasking. Switching between apps should not slow down the phone. This phone can also be used to efficiently play small games without any lag. The phone takes time to load big apps and games and to efficiently multitask without lag, background apps have to be closed. After prolonged usage,   users have found that the phone may heat up. This phone is a good phone for every day average usage and regular apps and games. 

The phone has a 13 MP single rear camera with an aperture of f/2.0, which can record videos at 1080p at 30fps. The front camera is of 8 MP and is equipped with an LED flash. Images can be captured in low light and the image resolution is of 4128 x 3096 pixels. The camera has the normal smartphone features such as digital zoom, face detection and touch to focus. According to user reviews, the images clicked in daylight are excellent and have a good sense of natural depth, vivid colours and pixel resolution. But for night time photography, the pictures are not sharp and the camera struggles to focus in low light. In this budget range, Eluga 550 does have one of the better cameras.

The phone has a non removable Li-ion 3250 mAh battery which can be charged by a 10 W charger. A micro USB cable can also be used for charging the phone. It takes around 3 hours for the phone to completely charge from 0 to 100. For moderate usage, the battery can last for approximately a day. While if heavily used along with gaming, the battery will drain out in around 4 to 5 hours. The phone is not made for heavy usage and the battery performance only supports moderate usage efficiently. Playing big games on the phone will also lead to a fast drain of its battery. 

For its offering price and normal to medium usage, this is a good phone. It will give a good performance without much lag and the battery will last for long hours. The phone has a good camera and the display screen is vibrant and big. It has all the basic smartphone features along with a good configuration. The phone will not lag much in moderate usage. However, it is to be kept in mind that the phone is made for heavy usage or big games. If looking for phones to support heavy usage, better configuration phones are available in the same price range.