Innjoo One was launched on Wednesday, February 11, 2015 with preorder starting on Feb 12 exclusively on Jumia. We got an advance unit of the Innjoo One 3G HD from Jumia and have been playing around with it for a day and a couple of hours and will be sharing our first impression review here.
Where to Buy Innjoo Phones
Jumia.com.ngfrom ₦19,200.00 Buy Now (Nigeria)
Konga.comfrom ₦20,500.00 Buy Now (Nigeria)
Jumia.co.kefrom KSh 8,999.00 Buy Now (Kenya)
Innjoo One is available in both LTE and 3G models, but the 3G model is the one that will be available in Nigeria. The Innjoo One is so far the best design from Innjoo with a premium look and feel, but will not set you back so much in terms of cost.
The Design
Innjoo One is a gorgeous smartphone. There is no cheap plastic to report. Its body is crafted with a metal frame with tough Dragontrail Glass covering the front and the back.
When you first pickup the Innjoo One, you can not but notice its super light weight and super slim design. The One weighs just 123 g, which is like shaving off a full 42 g off the Innjoo i2s. It is also lighter and slimmer than the Infinix Zero, which weighs 156 g.
The design of the Innjoo One with its rounded corners sort of reminds me of the iPhone 5S, though the One is bigger and slimmer. However, that is where the similarity ends as the Innjoo One takes its own design with a glass on metal finishing.
The 5-inch display sits very comfortably in front of the phone. The bezel is slim, making the display the star attraction in the front. Below the display are the three capacitive touch buttons for navigation, which are not visible until you press them while the phone is unlocked.
Above the screen is the 8 megapixels camera and the earpiece.
On the left side is the two SIM slots. The SIM 1 slot supports micro SIM, while the SIM 2 slot supports the smaller Nano SIM. SIM 2 slot also doubles as a microSD slot and can take up to 64GB memory card. The implication is that if you must add a memory card, you will have to sacrifice the second SIM slot.
Two physical buttons sits on the right side, the first button is for volume control, while the lower and smaller button is the power button for turning on, turning off, or unlocking the phone.
The back of the Innjoo One is covered in glass with Innjoo written around the middle. On the top left corner is the 13 megapixels camera and LED Flash. The loudspeaker is on the lower left corner.
The back is non-removable, so the battery cannot be replaced.
The 3.5mm jack is located on top, while the microUSB port and the mouthpiece are positioned on the bottom side.
The Innjoo One is comfortable to hold. Though the back is covered with glass, the design is in such a way that your hand is never really in contact with the back, but the metallic sides, which gives a very good grip.
The Display
Innjoo One features a brilliant 5-inch IPS display with 720 x 1280 pixels resolution. The display is bright with no pixellation in site. The colour reproduction is also accurate.
The display offers auto brightness feature that alters the brightness of the screen depending on the lighting in your surrounding. So that whether indoors or outdoors, the display shines through.
The Camera
Innjoo One sports a 13 megapixels rear camera and an 8 megapixels front facing camera. Both cameras can record 1080p HD video. The 8 megapixels front camera will be great for taking selfies or for taking wefies with your friends. It will also be great for making video calls on Skype.
The 13 megapixels rear camera offers great shots with great colour accuracy. The camera on the Innjoo One also features HDR, voice capture, face detection, smile shot, and of course LED flash.
There are a couple of included software to enable you retouch your photos before sharing.
The Performance
Innjoo One is built for high performance. It features a 1.7GHz octa-core processor with 2GB of RAM. Though it features 8-cores, all cores are not ‘On‘ all the time, the phone uses the right amount of cores to efficiently handle the job(s) at hand. This makes the Innjoo One power efficient and probably why the phone does not heat up so much.
Our early specs of the smartphone claimed the chipset was built on a 64-bit architecture, however this is not the case as our test shows it is actually a 32-bit chipset, the Mediatek MT6592. It seems the chipset with 64-bit architecture will be limited to the LTE models, which will not be sold on Nigeria. The Innjoo One 3G HD (the model for Nigeria) offers 32-bit architecture.
Whether 32-bit or 64-bit the Innjoo One is a super performer. We ran the AnTuTu Benchmark and our Innjoo One scored high. In the performance explanation, the Innjoo One performed better than 95% of devices (very impressive). This means that the Innjoo One is among the top 5 percent of smartphones in the world according to AnTuTu Benchmark (in general performance).
Innjoo One also did well in game performance and battery performance, ranking better than 60% of smartphones and 50% of smartphones respectively.
Overall, the Innjoo One scored 30334 on the AnTuTu Benchmark, which places it ahead of the first generation HTC One (i.e. the M7) and a couple of thousand points behind the LG G3 and the Nexus 5.
I think this score is impressive considering that the Innjoo One will cost just 27,999 Naira.
The true test of performance is in its actual use. The Innjoo One performance very smoothly with no lags. It also does not get hot unnecessarily. The battery performance is okay and can go for 24 hours without requiring recharging. But, of course battery life depends on what you do with your phone.
The Software
Innjoo One runs on Android 4.4.2 (KitKat). However, it is not stock Android, because like other mobile brands, Innjoo offers its own UI skin called the InnOS. The interface is minimalist and clean, which is good as you do not need to go back to school to learn how to use the phone.
The interface is intuitive, so operating the Innjoo One will be easy. To unlock the phone you press the power button and swipe the lower left corner of the screen from left to right. You can also enable ‘double tap to unlock‘ feature in settings if you prefer that.
Once on the Home screen you can swap left or right to see available apps. The InnOS UI puts Innjoo apps front and centre, Apps like the InnBrowser, InnStore, InnCloud, and the InnTheme are given prominence with Google Apps like the Google Play Store, GMail, Voice Search, etc, lumped up as a collection.
Innjoo supports the Google Play Store, so you can download and install anyone of the millions of apps at the store. You can also move apps around. Just press and hold the icon and move it to any location you want.
Pressing the middle capacitive button (Home button) takes you to the Home Screen. Press and hold the button if you want to see recently opened apps and swipe it if you want the current app to close.
The left capacitive touch button (Menu button) gives you options available for a given app. For example, when on the browser pressing the button will reveal options like New Tab, Bookmarks, History, etc. The right capacitive button is the back key.
Innjoo One comes with Google+, Skype, Facebook, Google Play Store, Gmail, Whatsapp, YouTube, Jumia Store, and a couple of other apps. There is also a Movie Studio app for creating great videos.
Communications
The Innjoo One offers crystal clear sound for making calls. Browsing is also great. Innjoo One comes with the InnBrowser, which is great. I also downloaded the the Google Chrome Browser and the Firefox Browser from the Google Play Store and browsing was smooth and fast on both.
Innjoo One 3G HD offers HSPA+ radio, which should give it download speed of up to 42.2 Mbps. Downloading the browsers mentioned above took seconds rather than minutes. So, Innjoo One will offer seamless video streaming and downloads. If you live in a country where the LTE models are on sale, you will even enjoy greater speeds.
Innjoo One offers a mobile hotspot feature. I was able to successfully connect my laptop and mobile devices to the hotspot. The good news was that the phone did not heat up and the battery was not depleting that much while running as a mobile hotspot.
Conclusion
The Innjoo One is by far the best smartphone from Innjoo. Its super light weight, slim frame and glass on metal finish gives it a premium look and feel. Combine this with the fact that the Innjoo One ranks among the top 5% smartphone in our performance test, but will cost just 27,999 Naira and you will understand why we have to declare the Innjoo One as the best value for money smartphone in Nigeria.
The requirement of sacrificing the second SIM if you want to expand your memory and the non-removable battery may ruffle some feathers, but by and large the Innjoo One is an impressive smartphone.
