Review Summary
Expert Rating
The Lava Bold N1 aims to provide budget-conscious users with a compelling smartphone experience. Priced under Rs 6,000, the device features 4G connectivity, a respectable display, and a dual rear camera setup capable of capturing social media-worthy photos. After a week of hands-on use, here’s how the Lava Bold N1 performed across key areas, including display, cameras, software, and battery life.
Table of Contents
Verdict
The Lava Bold N1 is suitable for those looking for an entry-level smartphone or someone switching from a feature phone. The handset impresses with its tall and bright display, a reliable software experience without any clutter, good battery endurance, and a camera that delivers serviceable images.
Comfortable build with a tall display
The Lava Bold N1 features a polycarbonate glossy rear panel with an iPhone 16-like camera module that houses dual sensors, aligned vertically and slightly protruding from the body. For a good in-hand feel and comfort, Lava has made the flat side frame edges slightly curved.
The right side of the frame holds the volume buttons and a power button. The latter integrates a fingerprint scanner, which unlocks the smartphone quickly. On the left side, you get a dual SIM tray, which has a dedicated slot for a microSD card. The top of the phone is completely plain, and the bottom is home to the speaker grille, a 3.5mm headphone jack, a USB Type-C port, and a microphone.
The Lava Bold N1 comes with a 6.75-inch IPS LCD display with 720 x 1600 pixels resolution (HD) and 90Hz refresh rate. Unlike many smartphones in its class, which sport a punch hole, including the Lava Bold N1 Pro, the handset features a relatively dated U-shaped notch to house the front camera.
Indoors, the brightness levels are more than sufficient, even at 60 to 70 percent, but when taking the phone outside under sunlight, the legibility takes a hit.
Vibrant camera shots on a budget
The Lava Bold N1 packs a 13MP 1/3.1-inch main camera with PDAF on the rear and a 5MP front camera. Such a camera setup is reasonable for the price, as competing phones like the itel A90 offer a similar camera hardware. The camera UI gets all the basic modes right, such as portrait, night mode, panorama, and a few others.
Now, coming to the actual camera performance, the Lava Bold N1 snaps photos with vibrant, eye-catching visuals, especially when it comes to reds and greens. While some may prefer such poppy tones, the phone at times goes overboard with the colours. Fortunately, the Bold N1 doesn’t overexpose the skies, and the HDR performance is fairly decent. The details in the images are average at best, as you can only expect so much from the sensor size it packs. Taking shots at 2x zoom levels further takes a hit on the detail levels.
In low light or at night, the camera viewfinder often makes the image too bright. You’ll need to manually reduce the brightness to avoid washed-out colours. Also, since there’s no optical image stabilisation (OIS), you’ll have to hold the camera steady to get clear photos, whether it’s day or night.
I compared the phone’s cameras against the itel A90 (review), and here’s how it fared:
Daylight
In daylight, the Lava Bold N1’s shot has warmer tones, while the itel A90 leans towards a cooler tone. While the detail levels remain largely similar on both, itel’s shot has higher levels of contrast, making Lava’s appear better in comparison. However, it is worth noting that the Lava Bold N1 does show signs of overexposure in the yellow and black stripes.
Portrait
When it comes to portraits, the Lava Bold N1 does a better job in separating the subject from the background in comparison to the itel A90. Furthermore, the handset offers better contrast, and the colours in the background are not blown out, which can’t be said for the itel A90.
Selfie
In selfies, the itel A90 comes on top as it does a better job in maintaining the skin colour of the subject, while displaying superior dynamic range performance. The Lava Bold N1 appears to have over-sharpened the subject’s skin and hair texture.
Low light
Although both smartphones struggle in capturing nighttime shots, the itel A90 displays a tad better performance as it tries to maintain the natural colours of the building and shows less noise. The Lava Bold N1’s shot appears grainy, and the building’s colours are overexposed. Both handsets fail in maintaining a balanced shutter speed.
Performance that gets the job done
Powering up the Lava Bold N1 is a 28nm-based Unisoc 9863A processor, paired with up to 4GB RAM and 64GB storage. The storage is user-expandable up to 256GB. The chipset here is an entry-level silicon that can run basic apps, such as WhatsApp, Gmail, Instagram, and Chrome. However, this is not without hiccups, as you may at times feel lag while scrolling and delay in opening apps. We tested the Lava Bold N1’s raw performance by running benchmarks, which were performed by an in-house testing team. You can find the scores across various apps below.
The itel A90, which costs Rs 500 more, offers a tad smoother scrolling experience when navigating through the UI or apps, despite both phones rocking a 90Hz refresh rate panel. But to itel’s credit, it utilises the Unisoc T7100, which is slightly better in terms of performance.
To get the most out of the performance and multitasking, the phone supports RAM expansion of up to 4GB, taking the total memory to 8GB. This feature comes enabled by default, and I used the device as it is throughout the review period. The handset was able to hold three to four apps in memory at a given time. As for connectivity, the processor lacks 5G capability and supports only 2.4GHz Wi-Fi bands.
The Lava Bold N1 boots Android 14 Go edition, which is a lightweight and less resource-heavy OS for phones that have low processing power and memory. The UI is stock Android, and offers basic customisation options, such as changing the UI accent colours and a sidebar to quickly access your most-used apps by just swiping inwards from the display edges. Interestingly, the UI has been kept clean with only the basic apps present, as I didn’t find any bloatware, apart from the Indus Appstore or extra games pre-installed. Additionally, the software packs nifty features like App Lock, an Anti-Peeping mode, and an Anti-theft alarm. Lava also claims the Bold N1 has no ads.
Since the phone is running on Android 14 Go edition, it features the Google Go app, a lighter alternative to the Google app. While Google Go gets the job done for searching stuff online, it lacks the Circle to Search functionality. Similarly, you miss out on Android 15 niceties such as partial screen recording and deep control over app permissions.
Impressive battery endurance
Powering up the smartphone is a 5,000mAh battery, which supports 10W charging using the in-box charger. To test the battery endurance, we ran the PCMark test on the Lava Bold N1, with the phone taking 9 hours and 21 minutes to drop to 20 percent levels. In this particular test, the phone cycles through various day-to-day applications and programmes such as opening and reading documents, rendering videos and games, scrolling through social media apps, and more.
In gaming, the battery held up pretty well as the phone lost just 7 to 8 percent on average in the three games we played for 30 minutes each, which included BGMI, Call of Duty: Mobile, and Real Racing 3. When it comes to charging, the device took more than two hours to juice up its 5,000mAh battery, which is a long duration for 2025 standards.
Final verdict
The Lava Bold N1 comes in a single 4GB RAM and 64GB storage option and retails for Rs 5,999. Its close rival, the itel A90 sells for Rs 6,499 and offers slightly smoother performance, thanks to a higher clock speed chipset. The itel handset also excels at selfies and nighttime shots.
That said, the Lava Bold N1 does a better job of providing a clean stock Android experience with no ads whatsoever. Additionally, the smartphone outshines its more expensive counterpart, the itel A90, with better daylight and portrait capabilities. The handset also stands out with its tall and vibrant display, useful software features like App Lock and sidebar, and a reliable battery that should get you through a day of mixed usage. Overall, the Lava Bold N1 has got you covered with a basic feature set for a smartphone.
Editor’s Rating: 7.4 / 10
Reasons to buy
- Tall and colourful 90Hz display with sufficient brightness levels indoors.
- Good weight balance with IP54 rating
- Stock Android software, which is clean and ad-free
- Battery that lasts an entire day with mixed usage
Reasons not to buy
- Misses out on the latest Android 15 update.
- Takes more than 2 hours for a full charge.
- Lacks 5G connectivity for high-speed internet
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