Lava Blaze Pro review: a good-looking budget smartphone with clean OS

Here's our review of Lava's new smartphone - the Blaze Pro

• By Ashish Kumar -
Published On: October 18, 2022

The Lava Blaze Pro is the latest and the most premium smartphone in the company's Blaze series lineup yet. Much like its younger sibling, the handset comes with a premium glass back along with a few other upgrades to justify the 'Pro' tag. The Lava Blaze Pro specifications include MediaTek Helio G37 chipset, a 50MP Triple AI camera, a 5,000mAh battery, and an HD+ screen. Apart from that, the handset comes in four hues, namely Glass Blue, Glass Green, Glass Orange, and Glass Gold. Lava sent us the Glass Blue colour option of the smartphone and here's what I make of the phone after using it for almost a week:

Verdict

The lowdown

• The Lava Blaze Pro is a good-looking device and the unit ships with frosted glass at the back, which doesn't just keep fingerprints and scratches at bay, but feels velvety to the touch too. However, the same cannot be said for the phone's frame, which employs plastic and touts a glossy finish. So much so, despite the frame's flat edges, I found the handset very slippery to hold. On the upside, buyers opting for the set will get an excellent transparent TPU case bundled in the box which works wonders for the in-hand grip. Moving on, the handset is relatively lightweight and the unit tips the scale at just 187 grams, meaning you should have no trouble holding the phone for extended periods to watch movies, TV shows, and more.
• The handset sports a fingerprint scanner embedded in the power button on the right spine, while the USB Type-C port, a 3.5mm headphone jack, and a speaker grille can be found at the bottom edge. Around the back, the smartphone packs a rectangular camera module, which houses triple sensors and an LED flash. There is also 50MP Megapixel AI camera text, a shutter icon next to the camera module, and the company's branding at the bottom. 

• Display-wise, the smartphone gets a 6.5-inch display with chunky bezels and a wide chin. The display is of IPS LCD variety, which bears HD+ (720p) resolution and a 90Hz refresh rate. The panel offers decent picture quality, with bright and punchy colours. While the outdoor visibility could have been better, I found the viewing angles on par with other budget smartphones. Be that as it may, the 90Hz refresh rate is a nice addition and works well across the interface and supported apps. The phone is Widevine L3 certified, which means it can only stream SD content from streaming platforms such as Netflix and Prime Video. 

• The Lava Blaze Pro is powered by the MediaTek Helio G37 SoC, which works alongside 4GB of RAM (with support for up to 3GB of virtual RAM), and 64GB of onboard storage. The phone also has a dedicated microSD card slot which can further expand the storage up to 256GB. So, how does the device perform? Starting with the benchmark results, the handset scored 946 points in the Geekbench multi-core test, while its AnTuTu score stands at 1,19,127 points. The phone was only able to deliver 73 percent of its peak performance under sustained load in the CPU Throttle test. This suggests that the handset should be able to handle medium to low-level tasks and that's indeed the case. In fact, I found the device's performance suitable for everyday usage. However, the same cannot be said for multitasking and I stumbled across noticeable lags while switching between the apps. While the handset can run handle graphically-heavy titles such as New State Mobile and Free Fire Max, it is the low-end games such as Pool 8 and Subway Surfer that are particularly enjoyable on the set.

• For photography, the Lava Blaze Pro rocks a triple camera setup at the back, which comprises a 50MP primary sensor. The main camera has been paired with a depth sensor and a 2MP macro sensor. Coming to the quality of the photos, the main camera outputs good-quality images with accurate colour reproduction, especially under the sun. The primary sensor supports 6x zoom, but it is nothing to write about. There is a visible noise across the frame. Be that as it may, the depth and macro sensors do well with edge detection and close-up shots respectively when the sun is out. 

• As for selfies and video calling, the phone sports an 8MP front-facing camera. I did find the images clicked by the front camera lacking details and colour accuracy, but considering the price-performance ratio, the results were good. In low light, both front and rear cameras struggle to keep up with the details, highlights, shutter speed and focus. The shots are filled with noise, some of which you can mitigate using the night mode, but even then, the results are average at best.
• The Lave Blaze Pro is driven by a 5,000mAh battery, which easily lasted a day for me while browsing, playing games, and watching TV shows and movies, with some juice still left in the tank. However, the handset could only pull a score of 10 hours and 34 minutes on the PC Mark battery test, which is quite less compared to its competitors. Making matters worse, the phone takes around 2.5-3 hours to fully charge a dead battery.

• Software-wise, the Lava Blaze Pro runs Android 12 out of the box. The interface is fairly stock and the smartphone doesn't come with a ton of pre-installed apps either. What's more, unlike some competing offerings, you won't have to deal with any annoying push notifications when using the set on a day-to-day basis. The icing on the cake is that the phone also gets call recording and screen recording features. That's not all, as you can even customise the handset to your taste with different wallpapers and themes. With that being said, the handset comes with dual-SIM 4G LTE support and connects to both 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz Wi-Fi bands. Lastly, the side-mounted fingerprint scanner of the phone works just fine, while the single bottom-firing speaker is average at best.

Final verdict

The Lava Blaze Pro is priced in India at Rs 10,499. For the same price, you can get Nokia C21 Plus 64GB (review) and Moto G22 (review), which also ship with stock Android. Both smartphones offer better battery life than the Lava Blaze Pro. That said, neither of the devices is a better performer than the Lava Blaze Pro. In fact, if it is the performance you are after, check out the Infinix Hot 12 Pro, which is cheaper and has a more powerful SoC than the Lava Blaze Pro.

That said, if you're in the market for a well-rounded budget Android that features a good-lookin design, a clean OS, a 90Hz refresh rate screen and decent performance, then the Blaze Pro is a good option too. What's more, the company is even throwing in a 100 days free screen replacement warranty, and home repair service to further sweeten the deal. Do let us know in the comments below as to what you make of the phone and as always, stay glued to our blog for more smartphone reviews.

Editor's rating: 3.5/5

Pros

• Good-looking design
• Decent screen
• Clean OS

Cons

• Performance could have been better
• Takes forever to charge