Spice Mi-410 Android Smartphone

Although Spice has been in the mobile game a long time now, and has only recently entered the Smartphone market, they haven't really outshined the competition. Their Mi-310 was not too bad though, but it's their upgrade i.e. the Mi-410 that's got the industry going ga-ga. So, I give you the Spice Mi-410 that sports a high power processor and large screen, but just so you know, technically, Spice had nothing to do with manufacturing the phone other than fixing their name on it. Beneath the Spice branding, its actually Huawei’s i9000 IDEOS X6, that’s sold in the West and Far East. But, is this enough to lure prospective buyers away from other seasoned brands? Let's find out.

Form Factor
The Mi-410 feels like a slab of metal in your hand. The design is very monolithic and is devoid of any curves or other design elements which does not make it very ergonomic. The 4.1-inch capacitive touch screen somewhat makes up for it though with a very decent resolution of 480 x 800 pixels. The screen is not fitted with Gorilla Glass, but isn’t very prone to scratches either. Android-centric touch sensitive buttons for Return, Options, Home and Search are located under the display. The Mi-410 is equipped with a pair of speakers located at the bottom on either sides of the device. By doing this, the sound is not muted when you place the phone on the table, but unfortunately it could be hampered if you hold it in your hand, as the tendency is to obviously hold a phone from the bottom when you're on speakerphone. There’s also a front-facing VGA camera, proximity sensor and ambient light sensor beside the earpiece.

Slim design and sturdy build

The power button is placed on the left and the volume rocker is on the right. While it's easy to control the volume with your thumb, it's a real pain when you have to lock/unlock the phone. The problem is that the power button does not have a groove nor is it raised and sits flush with the bezel so it’s hard to tell exactly where it is without looking. It should have been placed on the top beside the 3.5mm headphone jack. At the bottom we have a mini-HDMI and micro-USB port. The HDMI-out is a great addition, especially when you consider the price.

Screen is decently bright but only indoors

The 5.0MP camera is slightly raised above the body of the phone and without a lens protector it's prone to scratches. The Mi-410 is also capable of capturing 720p videos at 30fps, another first for a sub-15K phone. While most of the body is made of plastic, the battery cover is metal. Along with the battery, the phone feels a bit heavy in your pocket at 143g, and a bit slippery as well due to the metal back. Overall, the Mi-410 has a pretty good build quality and by no means feels like a cheap phone that you would be ashamed to flaunt in public. 

Features and Performance
Interface
The Spice Mi-410 runs stock Android Froyo (2.2.2) with a few customizations here and there. At first, it feels a bit laggy, but a quick install of Launcher Pro fixes everything. Whether you're swiping through the home screen or scrolling through the menu, the motion feels fluid and snappy. Even the animations are butter smooth, and why not! After all, there’s a 1GHz Snapdragon CPU with an Adreno 205 GPU beating inside. Spice (or Huawei to be precise) has taken some cues from HTC and included an LED indicator in the earpiece. It blinks green when you get an alert and red when the battery is low.

Navigation is quick and fluid

The Mi-410 also has three scene modes which are preset themes with different widgets like Travel, Work, etc just like in Sense UI. The lock screen also gives you the option for accessing the Phonebook, Contacts or Messages directly without having to unlock the phone first, another feature seen in the latest version of Sense UI.

The screen has decent brightness and colors for indoor use, but outdoors everything goes for a toss. Even at maximum brightness, you can barely make out what's on the screen. Also, when the screen gets too greasy (which happens very quickly), it's not very responsive. Many times I found myself struggling to unlock the screen. The touch sensitive buttons work fine without much problem. Boot up time may appear to be quick, but it still takes some time for all the widgets to load.  

Media
The default video player will only playback AVI, MP4 and 3GP files. It won’t even detect any other file formats. There are two applications, Videos and Video Portal. While, Videos simply lists the available videos without any options to group them, Video Portal does a better job in presenting your videos and also gives you access to YouTube. The default player is quite strict when it comes to playing back AVI, as I noticed some SD videos would not get detected.

Videos look good, but the colors aren't very vibrant

Moboplayer (which is free to download) helps you read more file formats like MOV, FLV and MKV, but for some reason we couldn’t get 720p MKV files to play smoothly or AVI (encoded with Xvid) for that matter. You’d think a phone with a 1GHz CPU would just breeze through this test, but sadly it doesn't. I also encountered a very strange bug with the media player. If you try to play a full HD AVI file in any player, the audio starts playing, but there's no way to stop it. I tried shutting the player by killing the process via the settings as well but the audio continued to play. If you own this phone, do not attempt to do this, you have been warned.

Audio playback is decent and the speakers are loud enough to be heard even when travelling. Although the Huawei X6 packs a Dolby sound enhancement feature, the Mi-410 does not have this. The audio quality with the stock earphones is average but it gets better if you use good IEMs like the EP-630s. The stock music player doesn't have any equalizer presets either for enhancing the sound. 

Other multimedia apps include FM Radio which worked well even when travelling and MuVee video editor for editing MP4 and 3gp files. Here, you have options to trim, fade in/out, join a video or add text to it, all of which are very basic but simple to use.