Phicomm Energy 653

In terms of design, the Phicomm Energy 653 is unremarkable at best. The device is made out of plastic, and features a two-tone finish with a black body and white removable back panel. The rear shell is glossy, and prone to getting smudged and scratched easily. Above the display you’ll find the front camera, sensors and earpiece, while below the screen is a row of non-backlit capacitive Android keys.

The Energy 653 features an 8MP primary camera and a 2MP front camera. The camera app is simple to use and features a bunch of controls and effects. When viewed in landscape mode, you’ll find controls for the shutter, gallery and video/photo mode on the right. Apart from the front/rear camera toggle and flash controls on the right, you’ll find a shortcut called Shot Mode, with options like Zero Shutter, Burst Mode, HDR and Anti-Shake. There are also a range of colour effects like black and white, sepia, negative, solarize, posterize, aqua, etc. In settings, you can adjust exposure, white balance, picture quality, face detection and the timer. We didn’t expect much from the cameras considering the smartphone’s price, and the results confirmed this. The camera takes usable photos in daylight, but lowlight images are very grainy. It also has trouble focussing, especially for macro shots. The front camera often gave us blurry, washed out shots, so we wouldn’t recommend it for selfies. 

One of the standout features of the Energy 653 is its software. The device runs Android 5.1 Lollipop, overlaid with Phicomm’s Expect 5.0 UI. The interface is more like a skin, changing a few design elements like the icons, but otherwise retaining the stock Android experience. It even features an app drawer, unlike most other Chinese UI's. Pre-loaded content is sparse, with Amazon Shopping being the only third-party app. In the settings menu, you’ll find a section called Buttons. Here, you can program the power button to end a call, and the volume rocker to wake your device. You can choose a specific long-press and double tap action for the home button, and even configure it to answer incoming calls with a short press. For the menu button, you can choose both a short press and long press action.

To power the smartphone, Phicomm has opted for Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 210 chip, consisting of four cores clocked at 1.1GHz. The device is paired with a gig of RAM. Day-to-day performance was smooth and unmarred by any freezes or app crashes – pretty decent for a device at its price. To put the GPU to the test, we played games like Swordigo and Riptide GP2, and the smartphone didn't overheat even after 15-20 minutes of gameplay. There are a few noticeable frame drops and jitters, but gaming is a smooth experience overall. Our only issue with using the phone had to do with its faulty proximity sensor, which made phone calls virtually impossible. It wasn't just an occasional glitch – the touchscreen got activated every single time we made a phone call, either putting the caller on speaker, on hold and sometimes even calling a random contact.