Obi Hornbill S551 Announced: What you need to know

Obi is one of the newest entrants in the Indian smartphone market but garnering lots of attention with its value-for-money offerings. Latest addition to its kitty is the Hornbill S551, which the smartphone maker is touting as the top model of its portfolio. Priced quite affordable at Rs 9,250, the smartphone is packed with a powerful configuration and smart features. In case you are looking for an affordable yet powerful phablet, and considering the Obi Hornbill S551 for that matter, here is all the information you need to know before finalizing your decision.

Display, design, UI

The Obi Hornbill S551 is a gorgeous looking smartphone with a 5.5-inch IPS display, where the pixels are tightly packed at 720p (HD) resolution. Despite of a massive screen, the smartphone weighs just 145g, lighter than the Apple iPhone 6 Plus (172g). It’s 7.9mm thick, and carries a stylish streamlined body.

UI and configuration

The Hornbill runs Android 4.4.2 with voice assistant that lets you launch searches, send messages and a lot more just by saying ‘OK Google’. It also comes with pre-defined gestures allowing you to open selected apps just by writing letters on the home screen. Moreover, with support to 18 regional languages, the smartphone enables you connect with your dear ones in the language you are comfortable with.

Under the hood ticks a quad-core MT6582 processor running at a rate of 1.3GHz, coupled with 1GB of RAM. The internal storage capacity is 8GB which is further expandable up to 32GB using memory card slot. Nonetheless, the built-in memory available to user for storing multimedia is limited to 4GB only.

Camera

Though the Hornbill scores good on all fronts, but what steals the show here is the rear snapper. The device packs a 13-megapixel primary shooter with auto focus and Sony IMX111/IMX219 sensors. The camera is equipped with special features including HDR mode, geo-tagging, panoramic view, face detection, face beautification, wide screen video recording etc. On the other hand, the front shooter is equally smart with 5-megapixel for selfies and video calling.

Battery and connectivity

The smartphone can accommodate two SIMs, but the slots are not same. One slot supports standard SIM, while the other can hold a micro-SIM. Unlike other budget smartphones which support 3G only on first SIM, the Obi Hornbill supports 3G on both the slots. Other connectivity features include Wi-Fi-IEEE 802.11 b/g/n, Bluetooth 4.0, GPS, micro USB 2.0 etc. and networking.

The Obi Hornbill sips juice from a 2,200mAh removable lithium-ion battery which is claimed to deliver eight hours of talk time and up to 200 hours of standby time.

Despite of being piled with numerous exciting features, Obi has been liberal when it comes to pricing. The company has pitched the smartphone against the Xiaomi Redmi Note, which is certainly more powerful in terms of specifications, but people who look for both performance and style will definitely fall for it.