Intel Xolo

The famous chip maker's first smartphone is dependable, if not sexy
Everyone wanted to date the hottest girl in class. Once you managed to score that, you found out that she was not always easy to handle and frequently stood you up giving you lame excuses in complete contrast to the less flashy women who seldom let you down.

The Xolo is very significant device for Intel – it’s the first smartphone to wear the iconic “Intel inside” badge and although this phone has been developed in collaboration with Indian handset manufacturer Lava, it’s clearly being positioned as an Intel-powered phone with the new Xolo branding. Intel showcased this device at Barcelona’s World Mobile Congress in March and finally laid all speculation to rest about the Intel Medfield platform and chip.

You are bound to love its understated presence that includes an elegant chrome ring and a soft touch back that offers a welcome relief from the plasticky feel of some premium devices. It weighs just 127gms and feels great to hold. We are increasingly getting used to smart phones without removable back covers and the Xolo joins the party – no removable battery, an i-Phone style micro-SIM slot and no extendable memory. The Xolo has 16GB of internal memory that should suffice unless you like carrying your favourite movies everywhere.

With a 4-inch 1024 x 600 display screen and above average speakers, the device can keep you entertained long enough, with the 8MP shooter being more than par for the course. But ultimately this device is about the processor, and for a company that has dominated the desktop processor space, Intel has never made any serious inroads into the Smartphone space yet with a lot riding inside this 1.6GHz Intel Atom Z2460 chip.

The Xolo competes admirably with other Android flagships like the quad core powered HTC One X and the Samsung Galaxy S2. It multitasks effortlessly and gaming gets an extra boost with the device’s 400MHz graphics clock and the device’s battery life is among the best in its class. If you are not a big fan of custom UI like HTC Sense or Samsung Touchwiz, Xolo’s all-Android Gingerbread interface takes you back to the early days of Android when device manufacturers were not eager to leave their stamp on the Android user experience. 

The Xolo may not be the hottest looker out there but makes a strong case just like that dependable girlfriend back in college. It’s a solid device that almost checks all the boxes and is a compelling buy at Rs 22,000. And there’s a good chance that Xolo will be ready with its Android 4.0 ICS upgrade before you feel the need for that extra excitement that might lead you astray.