Panasonic P101

Launched in April 2018, Panasonic P101 is available in three bright colours, gold, black and blue. The model’s price starts at Rs. 6,999. All its features range from average to below average and the phone has a poor display. Prone to lagging and frozen screens, this Panasonic model is not very popular among its users. 

The phone has a light weight of 145 grams and supports OTG connectivity. It has a bezel less display and resembles any other average smartphone. There is a rear mounted fingerprint sensor in this model. Panasonic P101 has a basic design, is lightweight and looks like any basic smartphone on the market. It’s design fails to make it stand out among the phones in the same price range. 

This Panasonic model has a 5.45 inch qHD touchscreen display with a pixel resolution of 480 x 960 and a 197 PPI. The phone has an IPS LCD capacitive touchscreen with 16M colours and a screen to body ratio of 71.5%. The display of the phone is below average and comes with a 18:9 aspect ratio. The front of the screen has a 2.5 D curved display. It has average viewing angles and the screen contents cannot be seen if the smartphone is placed under sunlight. The display of the model is below par and fails to impress among all models in the same price range. User reviews have also complained of an unresponsive screen very often. 

The phone is powered by a quad core 1.3 GHz Cortex A53 Mediatek MT6739WA with a PowerVR GE8100 processor. This smartphone runs on the Android 7.1 Nougat version and cannot be upgraded to recent versions of Android. P101 has a 2 GB RAM with 16 GB internal storage which can be expanded to 128 GB through a dedicated micro SD slot.  The phone has a mediocre configuration and is not suited for heavy usage. Multitasking, switching between apps, having too many background apps or playing games will slow down the phone immensely and will cause it to hang often. The below average configuration causes the phone to lag and makes the phone best suited to light usage. 

Panasonic P101 has a single rear camera of 8MP, and a front camera of 5MP. Both of these are equipped with an LED flash to help click pictures in low light. The camera is multi mode and has features such as auto focus, touch focus, portrait mode, time lapse and a beauty mode. However, all these features fall short in making its camera above average with its poor image resolution and lack of sharp, good quality images. The phone’s front camera is good for clicking selfies, and this model can record videos at 1080p at 30fps.

The smartphone has a non removable Li-ion 2500 mAh battery, which can be charged with a micro USB. The phone does not support a fast charging feature. For low usage, the phone can be used throughout the day. But for medium to heavy usage, the phone has to be charged after 4 to 6 hours of usage. The battery too is below average if a lot of phone usage is to be considered. 

Even for a budget phone, the phone is unimpressive. The budget phone market has become really competitive and Panasonic P101 fails to make the cut to stand out. All its features are either average or simply below par. It has a below average camera, a poor display resolution and sometimes unresponsive multi touch screen. Its battery performance is average and its overall configuration is also not impressive. In terms of design, the phone is lightweight and sleek. If looking at budget phones with better features and overall configuration, there is a plethora of better options on the market one can look at.