iBall Andi 4d Review

If you are on a very tight budget and are looking for an entry-level Android phone which can handle two SIM cards, the iBall Andi 4d from the AND SMART series could be an option.

Video Review

Video Review of iBall`s budget droid

Design and Build Quality
The iBall Andi 4d is the latest entry in iBall's lineup of mobile phones. It has a very sleek design with a completely glossy shell. The product resembles the Motorola Atrix 2 to an extent, but its edges are not as rounded. The phone feels a bit too heavy, and the glossy shell makes it feel slippery with a poor grip. The display featured here is a pretty large 4-inch capacitive touchscreen LCD which sports a resolution of 480 x 800 pixels. A large display is great for those who enjoy entertainment on the go. The front sports four touch buttons for Menu, Home, Back and Search, which are very responsive. What spoils the show a little is a small hole just below the Home button for the microphone, which should be located discretely on the bottom edge. The display has a screen guard preinstalled by the manufacturer which will save you the cost of buying one.

The rear panel features a 5-megapixel camera and an LED flash

The rear panel has just a large iBall logo and a speaker grill towards the bottom . Also on the top left is a 5-megapixel camera with a single LED flash and another hole for a secondary microphone which is used while video recording or for wind noise cancellation during a call. The rim of the device is chrome plated and gives the Andi 4d a great look. The top features the power button and headset socket while the left side has a volume rocker. The bottom has the usual micro USB interface. Opening the rear panel for inserting a memory card, battery or SIM card is a pain—the back cover is very stubborn and difficult to open, and it feels as though the plastic clips might break at any point. Overall, the design is pretty good and the build quality rugged enough. The phone weighs just 157 grams and is 11 mm thick. There is no eyelet for a lanyard, which many people use to keep their phone safe.

Dual SIM, GSM + GSM / CDMA, 1630 mAh Li-ion battery

Features and Performance

Interface
The iBall Andi 4d runs on a 1GHz ARM Cortex processor coupled with 512MB of RAM. The internal storage is 148MB, which is just enough for loading a handful of applications. External storage can be expanded up to 32GB via the micro SD slot. Sadly, being a newly launched product, we expected it to be loaded with at least Android ICS, but the operating system installed is Android Gingerbread 2.3.6, which is extremely outdated. The user interface is customized by iBall but there are no user-changeable options for anything such as an app drawer or desktop screens. Installing a custom home launcher is advisable if you buy this phone. The Andi 4d accommodates two GSM SIM cards or one GSM and one CDMA. The operating system includes the standard Android applications with a few freebies thrown in as well, such as Paint, IBNLive, MoneyControl, NimBuzz, CricketNext, Call Blocker and Documents to Go. The interface is not as fluid as we expected even though the touchscreen is pretty sensitive and responsive. There is no information about whether we can expect the manufacturer to release official OS and firmware updates. If it doesn't intend to do so, installing a third party developer ROM to upgrade the operating system to ICS or even Jellybean will be impossible until the phone becomes popular and someone with the right skills decides to crack the kernel and post the result online for the public to use. Until then, you would have to use the outdated Android Gingerbread operating system. We ran the usual set of tests for the phone in which Linpack gave us a single thread score of 23 and a multi thread score of 21. Antutu resulted in a score of 2992.

A plain non-customizable user interface