Champion Trendy 531

Built around a large display, the device is certainly big and bulky. In terms of the design, the Trendy 531 sports a typical design with a metallic rim running along its edges. The front of the phablet is covered by the display along with an earpiece, proximity sensor and front-facing camera above it. Below the display, there’s the usual three-button layout of capacitive keys. At the sides, the power button is located at the right whereas the volume rocker can be found at the left. The top houses the 3.5mm headphone jack and the microUSB port for charging is at the bottom. The headphone socket is placed on the curve, making a few third-party headsets incompatible since they don't go all the way in. The back has the main camera and a speaker mesh along with Champion and BSNL logos. However the BSNL logo looks like an afterthought and can come off quite easily. The back panel can be opened to reveal the removable battery, a pair of SIM card slots and a microSD card slot.

Riding on the huge interest for large-screen devices aka phablets these days, the BSNL Champion Trendy 531 flaunts a 5.3-inch display. The display is surely big and is ideal for reading text or viewing media. Though most of the smartphones in this price range sport 720p displays, the screen on the Trendy 531 bears a resolution of just 960 x 540 pixels. On the positive side, we didn’t notice any pixelation. However, the screen is quite reflective, which makes it illegible in sunlight even at full brightness. The viewing angles also leave a tad to be desired when it comes to watching movies or playing games. The box contents also include a scratch protector safeguarding the display against scratches.

Most of the devices from Indian vendors boast of big megapixel numbers, but in most of the cases, the resulting images don’t justify the hype. However, in the case of the Trendy 531, the 13-megapixel shooter delivered some good shots. For assisting shooting in low-light conditions, the phablet also features an LED flash. The device is capable of recording videos in 1,280 x 720 pixels.

The guts of the phone include a configuration found in most of the offerings from Indian manufacturers. For handling the performance, it has a MediaTek MT6589 chip with four Cortex-A7 cores clocked at 1.2GHz. Accompanying the processor is 1GB of RAM which makes sure that the device can multitask well. There was no lag while using the device for general tasks or while opening and closing apps, though minor lag does creep in while switching between apps. It was also able to handle graphics-intensive games like Riptide GP2 and Shadowgun: Deadzone reasonably well. But as highlighted earlier, poor viewing angles mar the gaming experience offered by the smartphone. Another problem we encountered was that the device heats up pretty quickly within a few minutes of playing an intensive game, although it doesn’t affect the gaming performance.

The Champion Trendy 531 offers the usual suite of connectivity features including 2G/3G network support, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and GPS. The dual-SIM slots can house a regular SIM card and a micro-SIM, but it’s important to note that 3G connectivity can only be availed on the micro-SIM slot.