Intex had launched the Aqua Fish handset in India for Rs. 5,499. I bought one and here is the Intex Aqua Fish review. This handset is unique, it is running sailfish OS that is different from Android but the OS does support Android apps.
Aqua Fish Unboxing
The box packing is quite impressive. Inside the box you will get the handset, battery of 2500 mAh capacity, screen guard, data cable, travel charger and standard quality earphone. SAR value as mentioned on the box : 0.737 W/Kg.
Design and Display
The Aqua Fish handset is using a plastic body with two color combination – Black and Orange. It looks good, from a distance but when you hold it you get that cheap plastic feel. Build quality and finishing is okay. The handset is rectangular shaped and weigh is 148 grams with battery. Dimensions are 72.01 x 142.52 x 9.29 (mm).
Back panel can be removed, back is orange color with matte finish. Power and volume button is on the right side. Audio jack and micro USB port is on the top and at the bottom there is speaker vent and microphone. Secondary mic is on the rear side next to the camera.
This is a dual SIM handset you can use two micro SIM’s as well as a micro SD card. There is LED notification – it’s in the front bottom. There are 3 sensors – accelerometer, light and proximity.
Intex Aqua Fish sports a 5 inch screen TFT with 1280 x 720 pixels resolution. Colour reproduction and viewing angles are good. Touch is smooth but since this is a button free OS you might find the touch getting unresponsive at times.
Memory and Storage
This handset is loaded with 2GB RAM and 16GB ROM, plus users can use micro SD card slot. OTG did not work, the handset did not even connect with my PC (windows 10), to transfer photos /video I had to take backup on SD card and then removed the SD card and connected to my PC.
Sailfish OS
Sailfish (Jolla) is a different OS based on Linux MeeGo. The icons, placement looks familiar but the navigation is a lot different. This is button free OS, i.e. there are no hardware buttons for navigation, in fact you will also not see any navigation buttons on the screen (on-screen navigation).
On some apps you might see a back button but in most cases you need to swipe to move back / switch etc. There are two ways you can swipe, from mid screen to left, right, top or bottom and from screen end to end, for example left to right, right to left, top to bottom and bottom to top.
If you have used Android smartphone before, you are not going to like this.
Now since the OS is different you also get access to a different store i.e. Jolla but thankfully this OS supports Android App (maintained by sailfish store), not every android app but it does support most important apps.
Common apps like whatsapp, twitter, facebook, gmail etc., works so you are not going to miss out your favorite app.
The biggest issue however is the contacts, this is not android OS and hence contact (people app) does not sync, you will need to manually make that happen by exporting / importing or if you already had your contacts on your SIM you will see them.
If you want to install apps you get two options you can either use the Jolla market app or Google play (store sailfish-app).
The home screen is plain simple, when you open any app it will show up on the home screen this allows you to easily switch between apps and also close the app thereby removing it from the home screen. Now again if you have used Android you are not going to like it.
Aqua Fish Performance
Intex Aqua Fish houses the Qualcomm Snapdragon 210 (MSM8909) 32 bit quad core hardware clocked at 1.2GHz with Adreno 304GPU. Performance was smooth, I did not find the OS lagging but whenever you open any app it takes around 2 seconds to load, the same happens when you switch app. Handset did not heat up much.
I could find any benchmark via the Jolla app but yes you can download / install Antutu and other android apps.
Benchmark
Antutu 32 bit – 19881, 3D score – 973
Nenamark 2 – did not show in Android app listing, hence not able to install.
Multi Touch – 5 point
Gaming
I was able to install Asphalt 8, a lot more data was downloaded as compared to Android system. But the game did work without issues, it was playable in High visual quality mode. Do note not every android game will work on this OS.
Camera
On the rear there is an 8MP AF camera with flash and on the front there is a 2MP FF camera. Rear camera can shoot 720p videos. This handset can play FHD videos.
Camera quality is below average (not so good). Check sample and video at the end of this review.
Others
Sound was loud and clear, in call sound was also pretty good. I did not face any network issues. 4G, WiFi, GPS and Bluetooth worked well. There is no Google map instead you can use Here map.
Battery
The 2500 mAh removable battery does a good job, I got over one day of battery life with mixed moderate usage. It took me 2 hours 55 minutes to charge the handset from 5% to 100% using the wall charger. When the handset is fully charged the LED light at the bottom lights up.
Verdict
Aqua Fish handset is good, performance is also satisfactory and it does support important Android apps. It will make no sense if you are buying this handset specially for running Android apps. If you are looking for some new OS adventure then that is a different thing, otherwise for general android users better buy a android smartphone.
Rating : 2 out of 5.
Intex Aqua Fish is available for Rs. 5,499 on ebay.in.
Image Gallery
Intex Aqua Fish video review
Aqua Fish Rear Camera sample
Front Camera sample
