Karbonn Sparkle V – Battery Life

The Sparkle V packs a 1700mAh battery that’s removable, so you can replace it or carry around a spare. In general use, it’s enough to get you through to the end of a normal working day, but if you use it intensely for things like streaming or Facebooking, it’ll be more of a struggle to get you up to midnight.

We ran the Battery HD Android app over a period of a week, which gives you a good idea of the drop-off during the day. From a fully charged handset at 8am, the drop-off is usually around 9pm.

In more intense testing, running a 720p HD video on loop with the screen on 50%, you’ll get 7 hours on average. We had similar results running the Geekbench 3 battery test as well. That’s about an hour less than what the Moto G manages in the same tests. An hour might not sound like much in the grand scheme of things, but when it’s a struggle to make it through to the late evening and there’s no great power-saving features, that hour means a lot.

Karbonn Sparkle V – Sound and Call Quality

Call quality is the kind of standard phone feature that often gets overlooked, and while the Sparkle V doesn’t do anything out of the ordinary, it offers a reasonable performance with nice clarity and no issues with signal drop-out to interrupt your conversations.

If you’re planning on listening to music out loud or watching a film without headphones, then the solitary speaker around the back does offer good clarity and a little warmth with good stability at top volume. It’s actually one of the Sparkle V’s more impressive features.

Should I buy the Karbonn Sparkle V?

If you’re looking to buy a phone under £150 and having stock Android matters to you, we’d still say give the Sparkle V a miss. It simply doesn’t offer anything new or groundbreaking to warrant your attention over other smartphones in that price bracket.

We thought Android One would represent a major change for entry-level phones, but that’s not how it’s played out and we’re not very impressed. Compare it to something like the recently announced Honor Holly, for instance, and while you have to live without stock Android, features like the camera and display are so much better.

We still say go for the 4.5-inch Moto G or the vastly improved 5-inch Moto G as your best cheap phone options. Alternatively, the Xperia M2, which also supports 4G and has more onboard storage, is also worth considering.

Verdict

The Karbonn Sparkle V is cheap and runs on pure Android, but you can get more for your money elsewhere.

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