US-based smartphone maker Blu has launched its latest affordable smartphone touted as the Blu Life Mark at INR 8,999 in India. The new smartphone is available for purchase exclusively on e-retailer Amazon in White colour. The highlight of this smartphone is the fingerprint sensor which makes it the first smartphone from the company to boast of a fingerprint sensor.
Blu Life Mark Specifications
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Blu Life Mark Coverage
Blu Life Mark With Fingerprint Sensor Launched At INR 8,999
Blue Life Mark FAQ, Pros, Cons, User Queries and Answers
Blu Life Mark Unboxing, Quick Review, Gaming and Benchmarks
Blu Life Mark Camera Review, Photo Samples
Blu Life Mark Unboxing
Life Mark comes packed in a white coloured rectangular cardboard box with pictures of the handset printed on top, left and right sides. Key features and specifications are printed at the bottom of the phone and other manufacturing and handset details are on the remaining two sides.
The box looks and feels very ordinary, and the handset is placed on the top shelf with a protective display coating that displays all the specs of the phone. The accessories or box contents are packed nicely and they are placed under the top compartment.
Blu Life Mark Box Contents
The contents found inside the Life Mark box are: –
- Life Mark Smartphone
- USB 2.0
- 2-pin charger
- Documents and guide
- Screen protector
- Silicon phone cover
Physical Overview
Blu Life Mark looks a little different from what most of the smartphones look like these days. It comes with a plastic back with glossy finish, the plastic does not feel very hard but it is of good quality. The back is slightly curved at both the sides that do make it a little handy to use. It has an aluminum frame covering the sides of the body and it feels pretty solid in hand. There is a 5 inch IPS display on the front which looks void of bezels when the display is turned off but it is actually surrounded by a thick black border that makes it look so. The phone does feel a little bit bulky but nothing over the limits; in fact it makes it feel more solid.
You will find the speaker mesh on the top with the front camera and proximity and light sensors.
The volume rocker and lock/power keys are on the right side.
3.5 m audio jack is located on the top.
The micro USB port is located at the bottom.
The back has the square shaped camera with a LED flash and a fingerprint sensor right below it.
The loudspeaker mesh is at the bottom of the back.
Blu Life Mark Photo Gallery
User Interface
It comes with almost stock Android 5.1 with minor additions on top. The look and feel of the user interface is authentic. Everything is in place and looks good but the company has used a very immature interface in some areas like the fingerprint management and smart gestures. There are a lot of preinstalled apps available on this phone including Kindle, Amazon, Touchpal, Truecaller, Google apps and some more. During our testing, the UI did not lag or hang at any point of time and it was working smooth.
Gaming Performance
Like always, we installed 2 games on this phone, which are Modern combat 5 and Dead Trigger 2. The Dead Trigger 2 was working just fine, I continued playing it to higher levels to experience the heating and performance but the device easily handled this game. The next thing was the Modern Combat 5 which was fairly smooth in the beginning but I noticed few frame drops once I reached level 3. The game was taking slightly longer to load the next stage and visible glitches were also noticed.
Note: – The gaming tests were done under an atmospheric temperature of 19 degree Celsius.
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The Life Mark did not heat up much even after playing continuously for 30 minutes, the maximum temperature we recorded was 39 degrees.
Life Mark Performance and Benchmark Scores
Life Mark does not disappoint when it comes to performance, I did not face any major issue while using this smartphone. Opening and closing of apps, scrolling, browsing and other tasks were easily handles. However it does hang in some areas when there are too many apps are running in the background.
The benchmark scores of the Blu Life Mark are:
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Verdict
At INR 8,999, it is a fair device to bring in a 5 inch HD display, 2 GB RAM, 13 MP rear snapper and a fingerprint scanner that feels immature but still efficient. The software is more or less what most of these affordable smartphones have on offer. It is a decent value for money smartphone with an average camera, good performance, efficient finger print scanner and a good battery life. It will compete with the Coolpad Note 3 Lite.
