Lava Bold N1 Pro

In terms of optics, the Lava Bold N1 Pro touts a 50MP camera on the back with PDAF, HDR, and the ability to shoot up to 1080P videos at 30FPS. In the camera app, you get options like Portrait, Night, Pro, Slow Motion, Ultra-res, Time Lapse, QR code scanner and Google Lens integration.The phone captures decent shots in good daylight. But the colours are muted and the details are soft. The Ultra-res mode clicks slightly sharper photos with a bigger file size. Portrait mode and Night mode shots are also just about passable for the price.Let's now dig deeper and compare the photos from Lava N1 Pro against its rival, the POCO C71 (review).Daylight

The Lava Bold N1 Pro is powered by a 12nm Unisoc T606 processor, with two Cortex A75 performance cores clocked at 1.6GHz. Its efficiency cores also run at the same clock speed, but they are Cortex-A55 cores. You can expect a bare-essential performance from this chip. For context, here's how it performed in our in-house benchmark tests:As you can see, the Unisoc T7250 inside the POCO C71 can perform faster.The performance on the Lava phone is backed by 4GB of LPDDR4X RAM and 128GB eMMC 5.1 storage. You can expand RAM up to an additional 4GB virtually, and the ROM can be extended up to 256GB using a memory card. By the way, the phone has a hybrid slot. The POCO phone offers more memory configurations up to 6GB + 128GB, and it has a dedicated microSD slot as well.In real-world use, the Lava Bold N1 Pro feels mostly smooth, with occasional jitters. I could browse multiple Chrome tabs, scroll and watch YouTube in full screen, play casual games, and use Reddit and Instagram without major issues. However, there were slight pauses while switching between recent apps, some friction while scrolling Instagram, and not many apps stay in memory either. But all this is expected from an entry-level phone.If you want more than casual gaming, FPS titles like COD: Mobile can be played at Low to Medium graphics + High frame rates, and BGMI at HD graphics and High frame rates. As the Burnout test shows, under continuous heavy load, the Lava Bold N1 Pro fares better than the POCO C71.Coming to the software side, Lava offers nearly stock Android 14, and as advertised, it has no ads or bloatware. But, you still get utilities like Gemini AI and an application sidebar, along with features like the ability to double-tap on the screen to wake it or turn it off, lift the phone to check time, notifications, and more, which is neat.Lava assures an Android 15 update and two years of security patches. But since the POCO C71 already ships with Android 15 and still promises two years of OS upgrades and four years of security updates, Lava's offer feels limited in comparison.

A 5,000mAh battery keeps the phone running. In our PCMark battery test, the phone ran for 11 hours and 17 minutes. And in a 30-minute YouTube playback test, the battery dropped by 4 percent. While these results are good and better than many phones in this league, the Lava phone isn't as efficient as the POCO C71, which, with its Android Go platform, managed 13 hours and 41 minutes of battery life.As for charging, the phone ships with a 10W charger but supports an 18W charging speed. So, if you happen to have a compatible 18W adapter, you can use it for a speedier top-up. In our test, charging from 20 to 100 percent took 146 minutes.